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13.4 Contributions of This Work
We view the primary contribution of this work to be the technical demonstration of how a richly structured repository of process examples can be used to automatically generate a wide range of ideas for innovative process designs. We have also, however, informally evaluated the Process Recombinator, and the methodology underlying it, in several real-life contexts.
13.4.1 Informal Evaluation Based on Field Studies
The most substantive example to date has been the field study to re-design the hiring processes for Firm A used as the basis for the examples above (Herman et al. 1998). Though this was not, by any means, a controlled experiment, the participants in this process innovation effort found the methodology and Handbook repository to be very effective in helping them generate a wide range of novel and promising process design alternatives. The Process Recombinator was completed after this field study in order to provide computational support for what we understood to be the key components of the methodology. We have re-enacted portions of these re-design experiences using the Recombinator and have found that it is effective in supporting them.Since then the Recombinator has been used in another field study to support a large bank's efforts to design new distribution/sales processes for physical financial products like travelers'checks, foreign currency, and precious metals. Before the study, the bank had close to a hundred different processes of this type. After analyzing their processes, they realized that all the processes were captured well as a set of bundles representing such dimensions as type of good, type of trading partner (bank, central bank, person), payment method, payment currency, and internal booking type. Once they had the space so systematized, they were able to use the recombination methodology to identify innovative combinations along these dimensions.These examples demonstrate well both sources of power of the Recombinator approach: (1) it allows process designers to draw ideas from many different organizations and domains, and (2) it spurs the creative process design through the systematic generation of novel combinations of these ''best-practice''ideas. The examples clearly show that a rich repository of appropriately organized process templates, supported by tools like the Recombinator, can have practical use in enhancing the creativity and effciency of process innovation.
13.4.2 Comparison to Related Process Design Tools
In our view, the Process Recombinator fills an important gap in existing process design technologies. As noted earlier, current techniques (Hammer and Champy 1993; Grover and Kettinger 1995; Harrington 1991; Kettinger, Guha, and Teng 1995; Kettinger and Grover 1995; Davenport 1993) offer little support for identifying new processes (Kettinger, Teng, and Guha 1997). They suggest how organizations can organize their process definition efforts (e.g., through brainstorming, visioning, and meeting facilitators) as well as record the resulting process designs (e.g., using IDEF or Petri nets) but do not help us actually generate new process alternative ideas.Others have explored the use of re-usable process templates (AT&T Quality Steering Committee 1992; McNair and Leibfried 1992; Schank and Abelson 1977; CIO Magazine 1992; Mi and Scacchi 1993), abstract process models (Sacerdoti 1974; Nau 1987) and systematic process alternative generation (Salancik and Leblebici 1988). Our work is unique, however, in how it systematically uses a large repository of empirically based examples to systematically generate many alternative combinations of process elements.Also related to our work are systems that automatically generate organizational designs based on descriptions of the organizational tasks and other factors (Baligh, Burton, and Opel 1990; Gasser 1992; Majchrzak and Gasser 1992). Baligh et al., for example, edited ''textbook''knowledge about organizational design into an ''expert system''that makes recommendations based on rules like ''If the environment is stable, then a formal organization is appropriate.''Our work differs from these approaches in at least two ways: (1) We are interested not only in providing ''conventional''guidance for ''traditional''organizations but also in providing tools to help ''invent''new organizations. (2) We are not attempting to provide completely automated advice based on simple input parameters (the traditional ''expert systems''approach). Instead, we are attempting to provide conceptual frameworks and partly automated tools to help enhance people's abilities to creatively define and systematically explore a large process design space. That is, we want to provide a helpful tool for use by human experts, not an ''automated expert''that tells humans what to do.
