Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes

*9224093马龙，全面质量管理、业务重组和信息技术等管理工具有多重要？该项目的目标是为理解和使用它们提供更坚实的理论和经验基础。为此，该项目将包括：(1)收集不同组织如何执行类似程序的实例，以及(2)将这些实例记录在在线“流程手册”中，其中包括备选方案的相对优势。该手册旨在帮助(A)重新设计现有的组织流程，(B)发明利用信息技术的新的组织流程，或许(C)自动生成支持组织流程的软件。这项工作的一个关键的智力贡献预计是一种在不同抽象级别表示过程的新方法。这种方法使用了计算机科学中关于继承的思想和协调理论中关于管理依赖项的思想。它的主要优点是，它允许用户显式地表示相关流程之间的相似之处(和不同之处)，并容易地找到或生成如何执行给定流程的合理替代方案。***

*** 9224093 Malone How important are managerial tools like total quality management, business reengineering, and information technology? The goal of this project is to provide a firmer theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding and using them. To do this, the project will include (1) collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and (2) representing these examples in an on line "process hand book" which includes the relative advantages of the alternatives. The handbook is intended to help (a) redesign existing organizational processes, (b) invent new organizational processes that take advantage of information technology, and perhaps (c) automatically generate software to support organizational processes. A key intellectual contribution of the work is expected to be a novel approach to representing processes at various levels of abstraction. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. Its primary advantage is that it allows users to explicitly represent the similarities (and differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternatives for how a given process could be performed. ***