Chapter 12: Inventing New Business Processes Using a Process Repository - Organizing Business Knowledge The Mit Process Handbook [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 12: Inventing New Business Processes Using a Process Repository

Mark Klein,

George A. Herman,

Jintae Lee,

Elisa O'Donnell,

Thomas Malone

12.1 The Challenge — Coping with Constant Change

It is by now a clich to talk about how rapidly things are changing in business. Hardly a year goes by without new threats, new opportunities, and new concepts clamoring for managers'attention: globalization, restructuring, e-business, m-commerce, knowledge management, and on and on (Abrahamson 1996; Abrahamson and Fairchild 2000). To some extent, of course, these terms are just buzzwords that represent changes in management fads more than changes in the underlying realities of business. But the seemingly insatiable appetite for new management concepts is driven, in part, by what seems to be an ever-accelerating rate of real change in many aspects of business. Large, successful companies have to innovate continually to remain successful. Small innovative start-ups can become market leaders in a matter of months or years, and they can become bankrupt almost as quickly (Davenport and Perez-Guardado 1999; Davenport 1994, 1995; Glasson 1994).

Of course, many kinds of management capabilities (not to mention a healthy dose of luck!) are needed for success in this environment. But one critical need for innovative companies is the ability to repeatedly generate new ideas about how to meet their business challenges. Such new ideas can, of course, come from many different sources, and some people and organizations seem to be ''naturally''better at generating them than others (Boden 1990; Stefik and Smoliar 1995). Wouldn't it be nice, however, if we had a more systematic way of generating such ideas?

In this chapter, we focus on one such systematic approach to generating new business ideas. The key idea of our approach is that a richly structured on-line repository of knowledge about business processes can significantly enhance the creativity of process designers by helping them systematically explore many alternative combinations of process elements. Such an approach could, of course, be used with purely random combinations of process elements. However, by structuring the knowledge repository using a rich network of empirically based process templates, we greatly increase the likelihood that useful alternatives will be generated.

While this approach will certainly not transform all workers into creative business geniuses, we believe it has the potential to increase the ability of almost anyone (or any organization) to reliably generate new and promising possibilities for innovation. We focus here only on the generation of these new ideas. The successful implementation of the ideas is also, of course, a very important—and very diffcult—task, but it is not the focus of this chapter.

The approach we will describe in this chapter is based on two primary elements. First, it relies upon a new theoretical perspective for understanding the deep structure of business processes and systematically exploring alternative surface structures for realizing these processes. Second, the approach uses a cumulative on-line knowledge repository (which we call a ''process handbook'') that contains numerous business process patterns and case examples organized according to this new theoretical perspective. Together, these two elements can help people systematically generate novel combinations of existing process components, and provocative analogies with structurally similar, but superficially different, situations. They can also speed the rate of knowledge sharing about innovative ideas (and ''best practices'') even when no novel combinations are created.

We proceed as follows in the rest of the chapter. In section 12.2 we briefly describe previous work on process generation and innovation. In section 12.3 we describe our approach in detail, including summaries of the key ideas from the Process Handbook project (Malone et al. 1999) and coordination theory (Malone and Crowston 1997) upon which our approach is based. In section 12.4 we illustrate our approach with an extended case study involving the redesign of a hiring process. We conclude in section 12.5 with an evaluation of the work to date and a discussion of future research.