Reengineering Organizational Structures from Within

2017

2006

Most organizations have traditionally been organized by function, and most coordination is intrafunctional rather than interfunctional. However, many organizations are finding that they must also manage processes-such as order fulfillment, new product development, and interorganizational supply chain management-that span their separate functional units and that integrate their activities with those of other organizations. These processes are essential to the well-being of organizations in a dynamic competitive environment.

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2005

Web service technology enables organizations to open up their business processes and engage in tightly coupled business networks to jointly offer goods and services. This paper systematically investigates all decisions that have to be made in the design of such networks and the processes carried out by its participants. Three areas of different kinds of design decisions are identified: the value modeling area, which addresses economic viability of the network, the collaboration modeling area, which addresses how business partners interact to produce the goods or services identified in the value modeling area, and the workflow modeling area, which addresses the design of internal processes needed for the interactions identified in the collaboration modeling area. We show, by reporting on a real-world case study, that there are significant differences between these areas: design decisions are unique for each area, IT support for collaboration processes is orthogonal to IT support for workflows, and the role of web choreography standards such as BPEL4WS differs for both of them.

Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT ’97, 1997

This paper reports on user experiences with the introduction of a groupware system in a government ministry. Our findings suggest that users understood the system as supporting collaboration, yet they had difficulties in understanding and using the groupware due to: I) the lack of corresponding representation in the user', actual working life, 2) the reluctance to change personal work habits in order to develop shared group conventions, 3) the organization's influence through strict codes and procedures, and 4) the different models of cooperative work that users and designers developed. We recommend that designers and practitioners focus training and analysis on developing a shared representation of the group toward its work and the groupware system.

Business Process Management Journal, 2003

Workflow management includes concepts of special interest to the business organization field and for the automation of processes within a company. However, process modeling via workflow specifications and workflow management systems can be applied in any field where a workflow exists. The use of CASE tools provides a great increase in performance in information system development but, on the other hand, these tools do not support group work and make skipped steps possible in a methodology. Applying workflow management systems as a meta-CASE tool together with the use of cooperative methodologies ± that aim to capture user requirements ± can help us to solve problems related to shortcomings in monitoring, controls, and audit information system development.

1995

Abstract The main scope of workflow systems has been the automation of formal procedures in the workplace. On the other hand, Communication and Group Support systems have addressed the informal aspects of organizational interactions. We argue that the formal versus informal separation is artificial and a cause of systems ineffectiveness. This paper proposes an approach to increase mutual awareness when integrating support for workflow systems and group interaction techniques.

2004

Modern organizations are investing in organizational process coordination tools such as groupware and workflow systems for better decision-making and business process execution. However, these systems are deployed in a standalone manner with the result that business processes that span these systems are highly fragmented. Processes are designed and managed independently for each system, resulting in large administration overheads to coordinate activities in business processes that use these systems. This paper reports on the development of a unified framework to design distributed organizational processes that interleave both individual and group activities for a seamless flow of information, promote efficient information sharing and effective task execution and improve the quality of decision making. Though process modeling for workflow and groupware systems has been treated as separate tasks in the extant literature, we provide a declarative AI planning based framework for enabling organizational process design based on recent developments of thinkLets for collaborative engineering and case-based reasoning for workflow design. We illustrate our framework in the context of designing processes to support new product development and describe a prototype system currently under development.

Many authors contend that realizing benefits of new information technologies requires adjusting such technologies to fit with the organization's context or, alternatively, they suggest adjusting organizational practices to accord with the new technologies (Rifkin, 1995). However, Orlikowski and Yates (2006) pointed out that the ways these prescriptions are applied in practice are yet ill defined. Our research yields practice-based suggestions for developing groupware, organizational processes, procedures, and organizational culture needed for successful implementation of information technology.

2001

Many of today's companies already have integrated workflow management systems (WFMS) within their ITinfrastructure which are mainly used for the core processes of the company. Furthermore these predefined processes are designed and implemented by specialists, whilst the process knowledge of the involved employees remains mostly unused. The daily business life, especially in office environments, often additionally requires flexible, rather short lived processes (ad hoc workflows), that can only be predetermined in advance to some degree. These two types of workflows have many interdependencies which are inadequately or not supported by currently available WFMS. For example some ad hoc processes that are used more than once and therefore get well tried by practical experience, could become established and important processes for the company. Thus these should be transitioned into predefined workflows in a traditional WFMS. The GroupProcess project examines the broad possibilities to support ad hoc processes in companies and creates connections to existing systems like WFMS, Knowledgeand Office-Management-Systems.

Knowledge-Based Systems, 2012

Organizational design is an important topic in the literature on organizations. Usually the design principles are addressed informally in this literature. This paper makes a first attempt to formally introduce design operators to formalize the design steps in the process of designing organizations. These operators help an organization designer create an organization design from scratch as well as offer the possibility to revise existing designs of organizations. The operators offer both top-down refinements and bottom-up grouping options. Importantly, the operators can be combined into complex operators that can serve as patterns for larger steps in an organization design process. The usability of the design operators is demonstrated in a running example. The contribution of this paper provides a solid basis for the development of a software environment supporting interactive organization design processes. This is demonstrated by an implemented prototype example tool.