Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Thomas W. Malone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kevin Crowston, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Jintae Lee, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Brian Pentland, Michigan State University
Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Document Type

Article

Date

1999

Keywords

organizational design, information technology, business processes, knowledge management

Disciplines

Business Administration, Management, and Operations

Description/Abstract

This paper reports on the first five years of work in a project to address these problems by (1) developing methodologies and software tools for representing and codifying organizational processes at varying levels of abstraction, and (2) collecting, organizing, and analyzing numerous examples of how different groups and companies perform similar functions. The result of this work is an on-line "process handbook" which can be used to help people: (1) redesign existing business processes, (2) invent new processes (especially those that take advantage of information technology), and (3) organize and share knowledge about organizational practices. We also expect this process handbook to be useful in automatically (or semiautomatically) generating software to support or analyze business processes, but that is not the focus of this paper (see Dellarocas 1996, 1997a, 1997b).

Additional Information

Other authors include:

George Wyner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Quimby, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Charles S. Osborn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Abraham Bernstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

George Herman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mark Klein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Elissa O'Donnell, Fidelity Investments

Recommended Citation

Malone, T. W., Crowston, K. G., Lee, J., Pentland, B., Dellarocas, C., Wyner, G., Quimby, J., Osborn, C. S., Bernstein, A., Herman, G., Klein, M., & O’Donnell, E. Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes. Management Science, 1999, 45, 3 (March), 425-443. (Reprinted in: Malone, T. W., Crowston, K. G., & Herman, G. (Eds.) Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R. J., & Scott-Morton, M. S., (Eds.) Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Source

local input

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.