Chapter 10: Tools for Inventing Organizations - Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, George Wyner, John Quimby, Abraham Bernstein, George Herman, Mark Klein, Charles S. Osborn, Elisa O'Donnell

Introduction

In recent years, we have seen striking examples of process innovations that have transformed the way organizations work. Although initially uncommon and perceived as radical, ideas like just-in-time inventory control and concurrent engineering have become accepted as "best practice" (Carter & Baker, 1991). These innovative practices have clearly been beneficial, but most organizations remain in need of improvement, as suggested by the on going popularity of "total quality management", "business process redesign", and "the learning organization". These slogans summarize ideas with real value, but they provide too little guidance about what the improved organization might look like in particular situations. They hold out the promise of innovation, but lack the details needed to accomplish it.

The gap between the need to innovate and the tools for doing so leaves us with a problem: How can we move beyond the practices of today to invent the best practices of tomorrow? And where will we keep getting new ideas for organizational processes to adapt to a continually changing world? For instance, how can we understand and exploit the new organizational possibilities enabled by the continuing, dramatic improvements in information technology? Given time, managers and employees of companies will certainly develop new ways of working that take advantage of these new opportunities. For quicker progress on these problems, however, our best hope is to develop a more systematic theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding organizational processes. If we are to understand successful organizational practices, we must be able to recognize and represent the organizational practices we see. And to improve organizational practice in a particular situation, we must also be able to imagine alternative ways of accomplishing the same things. Finally, we need some way of judging which alternatives are likely to be useful or desirable in which situations.

This paper reports on the first five years of work in a project to address these problems by

1. developing methodologies and software tools for representing and codifying organizational processes at varying levels of abstraction, and

2. collecting, organizing, and analyzing numerous examples of how different groups and companies perform similar functions.

The result of this work is an on-line Process Handbook which can be used to help people:

1. redesign existing business processes,

2. invent new processes (especially those that take advantage of information technology), and

3. organize and share knowledge about organizational practices.

We also expect this Process Handbook to be useful in automatically (or semiautomatically) generating software to support or analyze business processes, but that is not the focus of this paper (see Dellarocas, 1996, 1997a, 1997b).

The goal of compiling a complete handbook of business processes is, of course, a never-ending task. Our goal in this research project is more modest: to provide a "proof of concept" that limited versions of such a handbook are both technically feasible and managerially useful. Though this project is not yet complete, the initial goal of demonstrating the basic technical feasibility of this approach has been achieved, and that is the primary focus of this paper. We have also conducted field tests that demonstrate the potential managerial usefulness of such handbooks and we include a description of one such test.