TY - JOUR T1 - Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes JF - Management Science Y1 - 1999 A1 - Malone, Thomas W. A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Lee, Jintae A1 - Pentland, Brian A1 - Dellarocas, Chrysanthos A1 - Wyner, George A1 - Quimby, John A1 - Osborn, Charley A1 - Bernstein, Avi A1 - Herman, George A1 - Klein, Mark A1 - O'Donnell, Elissa KW - Coordination KW - Handbook KW - Process AB - This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an on-line "process handbook." The handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesign existing organizational processes, (2) invent new organizational processes (especially ones that take advantage of information technology), and (3) share ideas about organizational practices. A key element of the work is an approach to analyzing processes at various levels of abstraction, thus capturing both the details of specific processes as well as the "deep structure" of their similarities. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. A primary advantage of the approach is that it allows people 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. In addition to describing this new approach, the work reported here demonstrates the basic technical feasibility of these ideas and gives one example of their use in a field study. VL - 45 IS - 3 N1 - Reprinted in Malone, T. W., Crowston, K. & Herman, G. (Eds.) Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Reprinted in Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R. & Scott Morton, M. S. (Eds.). Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ER - TY - CONF T1 - Using a Process Handbook to design organizational processes T2 - Computational Organization Design: 1994 AAAI Spring Symposium Y1 - 1994 A1 - Dellarocas, C A1 - Lee, Jintae A1 - Malone, Thomas W. A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Pentland, Brian ED - Hulthage, Ingemar KW - Handbook KW - Process JF - Computational Organization Design: 1994 AAAI Spring Symposium PB - AAAI Press SN - 9780929280806 N1 - Technical Report SS-94-07 ER -