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Appendix — Implementation Overview
Software Implementation
The Process Handbook software provides a standard set of tools to browse, manipulate, and store process descriptions. Our current system is implemented under the Microsoft Windows operating system using Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language and numerous third-party modules for that environment (i.e., COM/ ActiveX-objects). The process descriptions are stored in a relational database (currently Microsoft Access) with an interface layer above the database that represents processes using the concepts described earlier (Ahmed 1998; Bernstein et al. 1995). This interface, implemented as a COM-object, allows programs to retrieve, edit, and add process descriptions. A number of different viewers and editors, including a Web-based browser (see http://process.mit.edu), have been implemented as part of the Process Handbook Project (for more information see Malone et al. 1999).
The Process Recombinator is an extension to the Process Handbook software. Using the same development environment we extended the existing tools to provide a user interface for specifying recombinations. Once specified, the Recombinator accesses the Process Handbook database through the same interface layer as the other viewers and editors and generates the new process models directly into the database. Those new models are then available for retrieval and manipulation using all of the tools provided by the Process Handbook software.
Content
The Process Recombinator software accesses the process knowledge base provided by the Process Handbook project. Numerous contributors developed content for the Process Handbook knowledge base, and the content was added to the knowledge base using the tools described above. The current repository has over 5,000 process descriptions ranging from specific examples to more generic templates.The contents of the Handbook come from both primary sources (e.g., student thesis projects) and secondary sources (e.g., published descriptions of innovative business practices). So far we have focused our data collection on the domain of ''supply chain management''—the process by which an organization (or group of organizations) manages the acquisition of inputs, the successive transformations of these inputs into products, and the distribution of these products to customers. For example, the handbook includes results from several MIT master's thesis studies of supply chain processes ranging from a Mexican beer factory to a university purchasing process (Geisler 1995; Leavitt 1995; Lyon 1995; Ruelas Gossi 1995). The entries also include a number of examples drawn from the ''Interesting Organizations Database''collected from published sources and student projects as part of an MIT research initiative on ''Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century.''Furthermore we have included processes from field studies that the center or its sponsors undertook.Finally, we have developed a framework of generic process descriptions. To develop such a framework, we reviewed generic business process models from a variety of published sources (e.g., Davenport 1993; Kotler 1997; Ulrich and Eppinger 1995). However, the Process Handbook does not force a single perspective on any of these processes. It can store different views of a process as alternative specializations.
