Zusammenfassung
This paper addresses the design problem of
providing IT support for emerging knowledge processes
(EKPs). EKPs are organizational activity
patterns that exhibit three characteristics in combination:
an emergent process of deliberations
with no best structure or sequence; requirements
for knowledge that are complex (both general and
situational), distributed across people, and
evolving dynamically; and an actor set that is
unpredictable in terms of job roles or prior knowledge.
Examples of EKPs include basic research,
new product development, strategic business
planning, and organization design. EKPs differ
qualitatively from semi-structured decision making
processes; therefore, they have unique requirements
that are not all thoroughly supported by
familiar classes of systems, such as executive
information systems, expert systems, electronic
communication systems, organizational memory
systems, or repositories. Further, the development
literature on familiar classes of systems
does not provide adequate guidance on how to
build systems that support EKPs. Consequently,
EKPs require a new IS design theory, as
explicated by Walls et al. (1992).
We created such a theory while designing and
deploying a system for the EKP of organization
design. The system was demonstrated through
Markus et al./Design Theory to Support EKPs
180 MIS Quarterly Vol. 26 No. 3/September 2002
subsequent empirical analysis to be successful in
supporting the process. Abstracting from the
experience of building this system, we developed
an IS design theory for EKP support systems.
This new IS design theory is an important theoretical
contribution, because it both provides
guidance to developers and sets an agenda for
academic research. EKP design theory makes
the development process more tractable for
developers by restricting the range of effective
features (or rules for selecting features) and the
range of effective development practices to a
more manageable set. EKP design theory also
sets an agenda for academic research by articulating
theory-based principles that are subject to
empirical, as well as practical, validation.
Beschreibung
Context-aware business processes
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