Using a Process Handbook to Design Organizational Processes

Computational Organization Design

Volume

Papers from the 1994 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The goal of the Process Handbook project is to provide a set of theories, methodologies, and tools, to enable the modeling and redesign of organizations in a more systematic way. A key element of the work is a novel approach to representing processes, which uses ideas from computer science about inheritance, and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. This representation improves understanding of complex processes, assists in the identification of process inefficiencies, and facilitates generation and comparative evaluation of alternative processes. We have built an online Process Handbook computer tool based on our approach, to represent, store, classify and manipulate business processes. Using that tool, we have developed the beginnings of a systematic design method for process (re)design.