Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes

Malone, Thomas W.; Crowston, Kevin; Lee, Jintae; Pentland, Brian T.; Dellarocas, Chrysanthos; Wyner, George M.; Quimby, John; Osborn, Charles S.; Bernstein, Abraham; Herman, George; Klein, Mark; O'Donnell, Elissa

doi:10.1287/mnsc.45.3.425

Cited by 518 publications

(321 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(14 reference statements)

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“…Process models have been very popular in the IS discipline for eliciting the requirements for information systems (cf. Malone et al, 1999), and they are regarded as important for the definition of IS applications and IT infrastructures for (information goods) electronic commerce (Kalakota and Whinston, 1996;Timmers, 1998). Strangely enough, these models are not often used to realize the other aspect of a working information system: the organizational architecture.…”

Section: It Architecture: Is Applications and Itinfrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Design Components for Information Market Services

Wijnhoven

2003

Towards the Knowledge Society

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Abstract:Information services are becoming more available and gain in importance for our economy. Many of these services, though often launched with great enthusiasm by their creators and sponsors, quickly die. This article assumes that the main cause of information service failure are based on an insufficient design at its beginning. Following an alignment model, information services design needs the selection of (1) a business model, (2) a process model, (3) a system architecture, and (4) an organizational architecture. Not much explicit understanding of each of these components exists, and consequently the article describes the basic typological elements of each component. The ideas are illustrated by current examples. The article concludes with a discussion and research agenda. Keywords:Information services design; Information goods; Information markets THE INFORMATION SERVICES DESIGN CHALLENGEFollowing Stamper (1973), who takes a semiotic stance, we define information as signs that represent something (e.g. knowledge, observations, illocutions and assertions). Information has at least two values ( 1) information helps the management of organizations, and (2) information is a value by itself (Shapiro and Varian, 1999). This article focuses on the second value, though both are not unrelated. Information as a value by itself is not a new concept, because people are inherently curious or enjoy patterns of representations in art. The efficiency of modem computers in information processing and the abilities of the Internet for communication give the following new opportunities (1) more people can be reached efficiently, and (2) information can be supplied and accessed easier, improving the cost-benefit relation of using information.

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Section: It Architecture: Is Applications and Itinfrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Design Components for Information Market Services

Wijnhoven

2003

Towards the Knowledge Society

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“…Malone et al [18] [19] conceptualized the types of dependencies between activities and corresponding coordination mechanisms. In this conceptualisation, resources emerge as a fundamental mediator between activities.…”

Section: Focusing the Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Handheld CSCW in the Meeting Environment

Antunes

Costa

2002

Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use

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Abstract. This paper discusses the role of PDA in the meeting environment. Three fundamental design issues are raised: PDA as mobile devices, CSCW devices and coordination devices. The research work described in this paper is focused on the coordination facet. The paper proposes three levels of detail to characterize meetings as coordination mechanisms and ascertain the role of PDA in that process. The first level identifies meeting agents and roles, as well as the tangible things necessary to support those roles. The second level describes how the tangible things are organized in meetings, highlighting repetitive patterns in meeting processes. Finally, the third level draws the functional requirements of the PDA support to the tangible things. The paper applies the proposed approach to a specific meeting environment, staff briefings, and uses a small consulting company as test bed. The PDA functionality was specified from analyzing how the test bed organization conducted staff briefings. A prototype was then developed. The test bed organization also produced feedback information on the prototype use. The obtained results indicate a general satisfaction with the functionality and increased enthusiasm with PDA usage in the meeting environment.

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“…Note that activity specialization is different from decomposition, which involves breaking an activity down into subactivities. While a subactivity represents a part of a process; a specialization represents a "subtype" or "way of" doing the process [20,21]. Resource, goal and assumption taxonomies can be defined in a similar manner.…”

Section: Preparing For Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One component is a body of work pursued over the past six years by the Process Handbook project at the MIT Center for Coordination Science [8,20,21]. The goal of this project is to produce a repository of process knowledge and associated tools that help people to better redesign organizational processes, learn about organizations, and automatically generate software.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%