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Part V: Conclusion
Chapter List
Appendix: Enabling Technology
Part Overview
We began this book with a vision—a vision of potentially huge repositories of knowledge about business activities and software processes that could be used for many purposes. These repositories could, for example, be used to advance research in organization theory in the same way that analogous classification systems helped advance research in chemistry and biology. They could be used to help managers, consultants, and business educators find the most current literature and case examples in their areas of interest. They could be used to help software developers significantly reduce the effort needed to create new programs from existing components and to customize programs for use in specific organizations. And they could be used to help invent new ideas about how to organize companies in the first place.
We believe that the work we have done in the Process Handbook project over the past decade demonstrates that this vision need not be just a fantasy. We believe that our work has made significant progress in showing both the feasibility and the desirability of this vision. We have developed a repository of moderate scale with many of the characteristics needed for the vision to be realized, and we have demonstrated the usefulness of this repository in a number of different applications.But much more work is needed for this vision to become a reality. One area where we believe there is significant opportunity for further research is in developing new user interfaces to help people search and browse through densely (but systematically) interconnected knowledge bases like ours, while still maintaining a sense of ''where''they are within the whole network. Another promising direction for many kinds of research is in applying the framework, software tools, and knowledge base to new problems like those described in section IV of this volume.But perhaps the most important challenge ahead is in developing more business content and keeping it constantly updated. Our repository currently includes a little over 5,000 activities. We believe that before even coming close to reaching the full potential of the vision, this number could easily be multiplied by a factor of at least 100 to 1,000.We don't believe that a single research group in a single academic institution is well suited to even attempt an effort on the scale that is needed. Instead, we believe that the fulfillment of this vision will require the efforts of many more people in many more academic and commercial organizations. We are not yet sure what organizational structure and what combination of scientific, educational, and economic incentives are appropriate for this effort. But we hope that the publication of this volume will help stimulate discussions about this question.Most of all, we hope that the vision we have been pursuing for more than a decade will someday become a reality from which we can all benefit.
