Conventional approaches lead to inflexible organization

Classic optimization approaches consider only the fully standardized formal processes and disregard knowledge intensive and informal ones. Similarly, the information systems considered are rigid and meant to support only the formal processes. As a consequence of over standardisation in both processes and information technology, the organizations become resistant to any change in operations. This inflexibility leads to delays in adapting their services and product to match the volatile and dynamic market needs.

Contemporary processes and IT allow flexibility

Currently, organizations are forced to diverge from classic and narrow approaches, and explore new alternative means to enable human-centric knowledge processes and collaborative information technologies. These ‘Collaborative technologies’ are considered to support a much larger spectrum of process types, namely formal as well as semi-formal and informal processes.

Lack of approaches to configure processes and IT

Even knowing the potentials of collaborative technologies, the organizations still show a very slow inclusion into their daily operations, and with relatively high failure rate. This is due to the fact that there are no comprehensive approaches or methods available to systematically identify, organize and map organizational process types to the available collaborative technologies.

Model to configure knowledge processes and IT applications

The aim of this dissertation is to provide organizations with a model and an application approach to configure their knowledge intensive processes with the functionalities offered by collaborative technologies. The model is structured into three main segments:

• description of attributes of knowledge intensive processes
• description of functionalities of collaborative technologies
• configurations of knowledge intensive processes and collaborative technologies

The model enables the organizations to recognise and configure knowledge intensive processes with their collaborative technologies. The model and scenarios are applicable within organizational settings supported by an application approach and tool based concept. The model is applied and validated within three diverse industrial case studies.