Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

50 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper describes a new project intended to provide a firmer theoretical and empirical foundation for such tasks as enterprise modeling, enterprise integration, and process re-engineering. The project includes (1) collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and (2) representing these examples in an on-line "process handbook" which includes the relative advantages of the alternatives. The handbook is intended to help (a) redesign existing organizational processes, (b) invent new organizational processes that take advantage of information technology, and perhaps (c) automatically generate software to support organizational processes. A key element of the work is a novel approach to representing processes at various levels of abstraction. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. Its primary advantage is that it allows users to explicitly represent the similarities (and differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternatives for how a given process could be performed.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2nd Workshop on Enabling Technologies
Subtitle of host publicationInfrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE 1993
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages72-82
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)0818640820
DOIs
StatePublished - 1993
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE 1993 - Morgantown, United States
Duration: Apr 20 1993Apr 22 1993

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE
ISSN (Print)1524-4547

Conference

Conference2nd Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE 1993
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMorgantown
Period4/20/934/22/93

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture

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