Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes

This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical. approach to tasks s uch as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project invo lves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar pro cesses, 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 ta ke advantage of information technology), and (3) share ideas about organiza tional 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 processe s 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 i t allows people to explicitly represent the similarities land differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternative s for how a given process could be performed. In addition to describing thi s new approach, the work reported here demonstrates the basic technical fea sibility of these ideas and gives one example of their use in a field study .