MIT Process Handbook

The Process Handbook (PH) is the result of more than 10 years of development by over 40 researchers and practitioners of the MIT Centre for Coordination Science (CCS). The PH is founded on a set of key concepts that support an innovative methodology for redesigning business processes.

The primary goal of PH is to be a comprehensive framework for organising large amounts of useful knowledge about business in a richly interconnected, consistent, and powerful way [Malone et al., 1999, 2003]. The PH is a large repository of business processes and available to the public over the web at http://ccs.mit.edu/ph. It can be used to help people in redesigning existing business processes, inventing new processes especially those that take advantage of information technology, and organising as well as sharing knowledge about organizational practices. It is also expected to be useful in (semi) automatically generating software to support or analyse business processes.

As the PH is a repository that organizes large amounts of useful knowledge about business, such knowledge came from use cases, alternative business models, textbook models, etc. It is categorized under different concepts. The concepts including in the PH’s contents are specialization enabling the creation of a type, subtype hierarchies of business processes, dependencies for capturing the resource relationships between processes, and coordination mechanisms which are processes that manage at least one dependency. Fig.II.5 summarizes the contents of the MIT PH as of July 2002.

At a research level the PH has been shown, as discussed in [Alessandro et al., 2007], to be useful in a variety of domains, such as business process reengineering, business process automation, software design, etc.

In this section, we discuss adopting the PH for modelling business process.

Table II. 5 Contents of the PH [Malone et al., 2003]

The major kind of content in the PH is the generic models of business activities. These generic models represent important activities (services) that occur in lots of businesses. They can be used in a number of ways [Malone et al., 2003]:

As a framework for organising and grouping many other kinds of business knowledge:

case examples, best practices, software tools, or contact information for knowledge experts.

Providing a useful starting point for modelling the specific details of a particular enterprise, process, or software module.

Stimulating new ideas about what is possible that might not have occurred.

The PH includes four primary kinds of generic models of business activities: the MIT business activity model, the MIT business model archetypes, a collection of comprehensive business process models developed elsewhere, and models of basic coordination processes. In

this section we only present the MIT business activity model and models of coordination processes. Both are the keys for modelling business processes.

2.3.2.1. MIT business activity model

The MIT business activity model (BAM) is one of the most important models. It represents a top or abstract level of business activity. Abstract activities are for example, buy, make, sell, etc. Such an activity describes the competence of its provider. Each abstract activity has parts that represent the actions to be performed at a functional level. For example, buy includes parts like identify own needs, identify potential sources, and select supplier. The following figure shows an example of the relation between an abstract activity and its corresponding functional level activities:

Fig.II. 9 Example of buy process with its parts

(copied from the Process Handbook online [http://process.mit.edu/Activity.asp?ID=1348])

Based on the SOA approach, we consider the abstract activities as abstract services and the functional level activities as business services.

The BAM is based on a theoretical analysis of business from the perspective of coordination theory. This perspective is related to the dependency and coordination mechanisms that have been presented previously in Section 1.2.4. The use of dependencies and their coordination mechanisms describes the interactions of resources between services.

2.3.2.2. Models of coordination processes

The models of coordination processes are the key mechanism of business process modelling.

The most generalized coordination process is called the manage dependency activity. The first three specializations of this activity are: manage flow, manage sharing, and manage fit; which

Abstract activity (or abstract service)

Functional level activities of buy (or business services)

are all the three basic types of dependencies presented in Section 1.2.4. An example of flow dependency has also been shown in the dependency section (Fig.II.3).

In some cases, these generic coordination mechanisms include deeper specializations that describe specific examples, such as manage by market, manage time by market bidding, etc.

Based on the SOA approach, we consider this kind of process as coordination services. Such services are collaborative services provided by the collaborative platform.

From the earlier applications as well as the developing goal of the PH itself, we realized that the PH is focused generally on specifying process within organizations but we are interested in applying the PH in an inter-organizational context to specify collaborative processes which are shared between different enterprises.

In a context of collaboration and the meta-model of collaborative process presented previously, the BAM allows us to define the services (abstract services and business services) exposed by partners through its abstract and functional level activities. The abstract service describes the competence of the partner. The flows of resources between business services are described by the dependencies which are managed by the coordination processes. The coordination process (coordination service) is the key mechanism for us to succeed in designing a collaborative process. Such a process is seen as collaborative services (or MIS services) implemented on the MIS platform to deal with the interoperability of partners’

services and data exchanges between services. Thus, these coordination services invoke or request the business services of partners by sending a message. The coordination service depends on messages to link with a business.