Malone et. al. 1993

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland (1993). Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes. MIT Center for Coordination Science Working Paper #131, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

If you wish, you may read this paper directly from CCS.

This paper introduces the main ideas that we will be using to discuss process analysis. These include:

• Decomposition. Process decomposition describes all the activities that are part of a process.
• Specialization. Process specialization describes the ways in which a process varies. Specializations represent a kind of process rather than a part of a process.
• Bundles. Bundles of related specializations offer the opportunity to contrast between different ways of performing a process in sufficient detail to describe a tradeoff matrix comparing different alternatives.
• Dependencies. Dependencies offer a systematic way to understand how activities within processes depend upon one another. They represent how resources are used within processes and can describe constraints within which processes must function.
• Coordination. Coordination represents the management of dependencies. This suggests the idea of coordination processes that offer different strategies for managing a given dependency. Choosing between these strategies redesigns a process. Choosing among alternative specializations offers the opportunity to generate new process designs relatively systematically.