COORDINATING DISTRIBUTED ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE

As organizations move from hierarchical towards market-like structures , their distributed units also take a larger role in the design and ev olution of organizational information systems. This requires strategie s which support the cooperative creation, evaluation and evolution of global information flow structures among autonomous organizational uni ts through local knowledge acquisition and maintenance. Three such str ategies are presented: cooperative conceptual modeling, multi-simulati on, and explicit process support. These strategies are formally embedd ed in a meta modeling framework and implemented with a repository-base d architecture. They are intended for the analysis of business process es in networked organizations, and as a basis for designing and evolvi ng their federated information systems.