@phdthesis{Malone.1993,
title = {Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes},
author = {Thomas Malone and Kevin Crowston},
publisher = {Center for Coordination Science},
school = {Massachusetts Institute of Technologie},
year = {1993},
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 sim'lar 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 (e) automatically
generate sofivare 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 coordinalion 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.},
urldate = {2007-10-10},
keywords = {diss }
}
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