Principal Investigator Thomas Malone
Exploration of how to coordinate and support the distributed design of business processes. Research is motivated by the observation that process design efforts are typically highly distributed in practice, with users playing an often unrecognized role in shaping the design of the processes they bring to life.
The process handbook method is being used to construct a taxonomy of design methods in general, process design methods in particular, and even more specifically distributed process design methods. This taxonomy will be used to identify patterns of similarity and difference as well as the trade-offs among alternative design approaches. Plans are to extend this taxonomy with new possibilities for distributed process design, developed by using coordination theory to "recoordinate" centralized design methods. An initial application of the taxonomy will be to process design efforts in connection with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations, with the goal being to explore the potential benefits in this arena of new approaches to distributed process design.