Part III: Contents Of The Process Handbook - Organizing Business Knowledge The Mit Process Handbook [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Part III: Contents Of The Process Handbook

Chapter List

Part IIIA: Overview of the Contents

Chapter 8: What Is in the Process Handbook?

Part IIIB: Examples of Specific Domain Content

Chapter 9: Let a Thousand Gardeners Prune — Cultivating Distributed Design in Complex Organizations

Chapter 10: A Coordination Perspective on Software Architecture — Toward a Design Handbook for Integrating Software Components

Part IIIC: Creating Process Descriptions

Chapter 11: A Coordination Theory Approach to Process Description and Redesign

Part Overview

Now that we have seen the core theoretical concepts upon which the Process Handbook is based, this section gives an overview of the various types of content that presently exist in the Handbook.

Chapter 8, by Herman and Malone, provides an overview of the Process Hand-book's contents. In a sense, this chapter is a ''guided tour''of what is present in the Handbook as of this writing (July 2002). The chapter describes and gives examples of the three primary elements that the Handbook contains today: (1) generic models of typical business activities, (2) specific case examples of particular companies, and (3) classification frameworks.

The chapter also describes our rationales for the selection and structure of the content we have included. For example, this chapter shows how we derived the basic MIT Business Activity Model, in part, using a fundamental analysis of the basic coordination problems that must be solved by most businesses.

The next part of this section includes chapters 9 and 10 with more detailed examples of content in specific domains. Chapter 9 is excerpted from Wyner's Ph.D. thesis. It presents several well-known approaches to business process redesign (e.g., Davenport 1993; Hammer and Champy 1993). One interesting aspect of this chapter is the way it represents and compares the previous approaches based on a careful textual analysis of the documents that describe them.

Chapter 10 is an excerpt from Dellarocas'Ph.D. thesis, and it describes part of a detailed taxonomy of the different types of dependencies that arise in software programs and the different kinds of coordination mechanisms that can be used to manage them. In particular, this chapter focuses on different types of resources and different mechanisms for managing flow dependencies in software systems.

The last part of this section addresses the problem of how to create new content for the Process Handbook. One promising approach to this problem is described in chapter 11, by Crowston and Osborn. This chapter focuses on how to go into an organization and gather the kind of information that is useful in creating descriptions for the Process Handbook. These techniques are illustrated by a case example of a specific company. The example shows that the same approaches to analyzing activities for description in the Process Handbook can also give important insights about the organization that are of value in their own right.