Table 8.1 summarizes the number of entries of different types that were included in the Process Handbook at MIT as of July 2002. Of course, there is an infinite amount of knowledge about business that could, in principle, be included in a repository like ours. In a sense, we have just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible in terms of organizing business content in this way. But we believe that the work we have done so far has achieved our initial goals. That is, so far we have demonstrated the potential of this approach to comprehensively organize large amounts of useful knowledge about business in a richly interconnected, consistent, and powerful way.
Different Versions of the Process Handbook There is no reason why there cannot be multiple versions of repositories like the Process Handbook. For example, as of this writing (July 2002), we have two such versions at MIT: the ''research''version of the
|
Type of entry |
Number of entries |
Example entries |
|---|---|---|
|
Activities | ||
|
Generic business activity models | ||
|
MIT Business Activity Model |
381 |
Buy, Make, Sell |
|
MIT Business Models Archetypes |
30 |
Produce as a Creator, Produce as a Broker |
|
Comprehensive business process models developed elsewhere |
689 |
International Benchmarking Clearinghouse's Process Classification Framework |
|
Coordination processes |
300 |
Manage by market with bidding |
|
Subtotal |
1400 | |
|
Case examples | ||
|
Supply chain |
100 |
Balance supply chain resources with requirements {Honda} |
|
Hiring |
50 |
Select human resources using agent software {Humana} |
|
e-Business examples |
420 |
Distribute books via electronic store {Amazon} |
|
Subtotal |
570 | |
|
Classification structure | ||
|
Generic verbs and other activity categories |
3252 |
Create, Modify, Preserve, Destroy, . . . , Develop, Make product, Provide service |
|
Total activities |
5232 | |
|
Other kinds of entries | ||
|
Dependencies |
73 |
Flow of information |
|
Resources |
163 |
Human agent, software agent, location |
|
Conceptual frameworks for specific research projects | ||
|
Exceptions |
260 |
Agent unavailable, resource shortfall |
|
Systems dynamics elements |
200 |
Goal-gap molecule, backlog molecule |
|
Total nonactivity entries |
696 | |
|
Total entries |
5928 |
Process Handbook, and the ''eBusiness Process Handbook''(ePH). The numbers summarized in table 8.1 are for the research version of the Handbook. This version is where we first introduce experimental new content, and it includes some content that we expect to be of interest primarily to other researchers. This version also uses the original user interface developed in our research project at MIT.
The eBusiness Process Handbook includes a subset of the content in the research version that we expect to be of interest to a broader audience including business school students and managers. This version uses the simpler-to-understand user interface from the commercial software product developed by Phios Corporation under license from MIT. The screen images included in this chapter come from this version of the Process Handbook (except those from the research version where noted). Both of these versions are currently available to the public over the Web at http://ccs.mit.edu/ph.