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Supporting process design for e-business via an integrated process repository

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Abstract

Business process design is an integral part of e-business engineering. Given that e-business models usually involve a wide range of business processes across different business functions with complex activities, events, and documents, process design for e-business is a very challenging task. Although various process reference models (PRMs) have been developed to provide guidelines for process design, research on leveraging multiple PRMs to support process design for e-business has been scant. In this paper, we demonstrate that the diverse process design requirements in e-business are best satisfied by utilizing multiple PRMs via a case study. Then, we propose a collaborative approach grounded in knowledge management theory to integrating multiple process reference models to better support process design in e-business. We equip the integrated process repository with a set of novel features based on Web 2.0 technologies to enhance its utility, efficiency, and quality for process design support. A prototype system is developed and user experiments are conducted to evaluate the system.

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Acknowledgments

The project is supported in part by the United States National Science Foundation, Awards #0725277 and #0713290, and a research grant from Delaware Design Institute at the University of Delaware.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Accounting and MIS, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

    Harry Jiannan Wang

  2. Department of Information Technology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA

    Harris Wu

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  1. Harry Jiannan Wang
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  2. Harris Wu
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Correspondence to Harry Jiannan Wang.

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Wang, H.J., Wu, H. Supporting process design for e-business via an integrated process repository. Inf Technol Manag 12, 97–109 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-010-0076-z

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