Organizing Business Knowledge : The MIT Process Handbook

by Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston and George A. Herman (Eds.)

• ISBN13: 9780262134293
• ISBN10: 0262134292
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-14
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The vision of the MIT Process Handbook Project is the creation of a systematic and powerful method of organizing and sharing business knowledge. Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbookpresents the key findings of a multidisciplinary research group at MIT's Sloan School of Management that has worked for over a decade to lay the foundation for just such a comprehensive system. It does so by focusing on the process itself. The book proposes a set of fundamental concepts to guide analysis and a classification framework for organizing knowledge, and describes the publicly available online knowledge base developed by the project, which includes a set of representative templates and specific case examples as well as a set of software tools for organizing and sharing knowledge. Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbookincludes twenty-one papers, some previously published and some appearing for the first time, that have come out of this decade-long project. Together, they form a comprehensive and coherent vision of the future of knowledge organization. The Handbook is organized into five parts: an introduction and overview; the presentation of a theory of process representation; "Contents of the Process Repository"; "Process Repository Uses," which gives examples from both research and practice; and a conclusion, which maps the progress so far and the challenges ahead.

Table of Contents

Contributors	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
I INTRODUCTION	1	(38)
Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes	13	(26)
Thomas W. Malone
Kevin Crowston
Jintae Lee
Brian T. Pentland
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
George M. Wyner
John Quimby
Abraham Bernstein
George A. Herman
Mark Klein
Charles S. Osborn
Elisa O'Donnell
II HOW CAN WE REPRESENT PROCESSES? TOWARD A THEORY OF PROCESS REPRESENTATION	39	(6)
IIA Coordination as the Management of Dependencies	45	(84)
The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination	47	(38)
Thomas W. Malone
Kevin Crowston
A Taxonomy of Organizational Dependencies and Coordination Mechanisms	85	(24)
Kevin Crowston
Toward a Design Handbook for Integrating Software Components	109	(20)
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
IIB Specialization of Processes: Organizing Collections of Related Processes	129	(46)
Defining Specialization for Process Models	131	(44)
George M. Wyner
Jintae Lee
IIC Different Views of Processes	175	(40)
Process as Theory in Information Systems Research	177	(14)
Kevin Crowston
Grammatical Models of Organizational Processes	191	(24)
Brian T. Pentland
III CONTENTS OF THE PROCESS HANDBOOK	215	(4)
IIIA Overview of the Contents	219	(40)
What Is in the Process Handbook?	221	(38)
George A. Herman
Thomas W. Malone
IIIB Examples of Specific Domain Content	259	(74)
Let a Thousand Gardeners Prune: Cultivating Distributed Design in Complex Organizations	261	(30)
George M. Wyner
A Coordination Perspective on Software Architecture: Toward a Design Handbook for Integrating Software Components	291	(42)
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
IIIC Creating Process Descriptions	333	(38)
A Coordination Theory Approach to Process Description and Redesign	335	(36)
Kevin Crowston
Charles S. Osborn
IV PROCESS REPOSITORY USES	371	(6)
IVA Business Process Redesign	377	(64)
Inventing New Business Processes Using a Process Repository	379	(24)
Mark Klein
George A. Herman
Jintae Lee
Elisa O'Donnell
Thomas W. Malone
The Process Recombinator: A Tool for Generating New Business Process Ideas	403	(20)
Abraham Bernstein
Mark Klein
Thomas W. Malone
Designing Robust Business Processes	423	(18)
Mark Klein
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
IVB Knowledge Management	441	(54)
A New Way to Manage Process Knowledge	443	(4)
Nicholas G. Carr
Toward a Systematic Repository of Knowledge about Managing Collaborative Design Conflicts	447	(18)
Mark Klein
Genre Taxonomy: A Knowledge Repository of Communicative Actions	465	(30)
Takeshi Yoshioka
George A. Herman
JoAnne Yates
Wanda Orlikowski
IVC Software Design and Generation	495	(50)
A Coordination Perspective on Software System Design	497	(18)
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
The Product Workbench: An Environment for the Mass-Customization of Production Processes	515	(10)
Abraham Bernstein
How Can Cooperative Work Tools Support Dynamic Group Processes? Bridging the Specificity Frontier	525	(20)
Abraham Bernstein
V CONCLUSION	545	(4)
Appendix: Enabling Technology	549	(28)
Consolidated References	577	(26)
Index	603