Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes

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.