A Foundational Work on Business Process Knowledge - Malone, as editor, and his contributing authors pose many questions in examining ways work can be represented and put together in different ways
Questions include a number of "how's" and "where's." How can we move beyond the practices of today to invent the best practices of tomorrow? Where will we keep getting new ideas for organizational processes to adapt to a continually changing world? How can we understand and exploit the new organizational possibilities enabled by the continuing, dramatic improvements in information technology?
Malone and co-authors suggest that key intellectual challenges are how to represent organizational processes and how to provide a means for decomposing business processes into sub-activities. One of their intents is to explore and compare many different possible combinations of specialization and coordination processes. They place substantial importance on the role of intelligent human ``editors'' in selecting, refining, and structuring ways this knowledge is to be represented.
They describe a website that provides a comprehensive and powerful approach to provide such information. This site serves as a "proof of concept' for organizing business knowledge.
Their hope is that this research will help us understand the possibilities for creating new kinds of organizations that are not only more effective but also more fulfilling for their members.
In this reviewer's opinion, this work fulfills the co-authors intentions here and lays the foundation for equally compelling books on "Inventing Organizations for the 21st Century" and "The Future of Work."