Designing for recombination: process design through template combination

  • Authors:

  • Arvind Karunakaran;Sandeep Purao

  • Affiliations:

  • Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States;College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States

  • Venue:
  • DESRIST'12 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems: advances in theory and practice
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Process design remains an important yet difficult concern for postindustrial organizations. We posit that processes ‘become' processes in these organizations only via their anchoring in concrete artifacts. Consequently, we identify and refine two design principles: processes as anchored in concrete material artifacts (not abstract process representations); and process design through recombination of existing processes (instead of designing anew). Our research starts by building a research artifact, ReKon, that instantiates these two principles. The paper describes this artifact with the meta-model, an implementation and the fine-granular process units, as template chunks created from ~1,200 real-world templates, to populate the tool. We revise and refine the design principles via successive cycles of implementation of the research artifact, formative evaluation with student teams, and insights obtained from an ongoing field study. We conclude by pointing to directions for future research.