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a realistic and acceptable range of alternatives and
careful consideration of the positive and negative
consequences that are associated with each
alternative considered (Hirokawa, 1992). In
addition to a well structured discourse output that
clearly addresses “know-what”, “know-why”,
“know-how” and “know-who” issues, the
precautionary manipulation of competing or even
conflicting problem interpretations, interests,
objectives, priorities and constraints leads to the
objective evaluation, synergy, stimulation and
construction of new knowledge. In this respect,
maximum exploitation and enhancement of the flow
of the underlying organizational knowledge are two
crucial requirements for efficient and effective
decision making in building a business process
model.
From the knowledge management perspective,
we can distinguish two different strategies towards
increasing the quality of business processing
modelling. The first addresses the codification of
knowledge by providing richer modelling
formalisms, whereas the second is focused on the
rigorous exploitation of personalised knowledge
(Hansen et al., 1999). In the context of the first
perspective, approaches originating from the area of
information systems development, such as the life-
cycle and the structured paradigm, or even
Prototyping and Rapid Application Development,
have been extremely criticized in that they do not
provide a sound understanding of business processes
and organizational change. To remedy this, new
methodologies emphasizing what people do while
communicating, how they create a common reality
by means of language and how communication
brings about the coordination of their activities (van
Reijswoud et al., 1999), have been proposed. These
have been basically founded on the
Language/Action perspective (Dignum et al., 1996)
and the Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1969), and
consider the utterance of various types of
communicative actions as the backbone of the
business process models.
More specifically, the Business Design Language
(Medina-Mora et al., 1992), based on the
Conversation for Action theory (Winograd and
Flores, 1986) that was conceptualized as an interplay
of requests and commitments during a collaborative
process, has as its basic modelling unit the so called
four-step action workflow protocol. SAMPO
(Auramäki et al., 1988) views organizational
activities as a series of speech acts that create,
maintain, modify, report and terminate
commitments, aiming at detecting the principles
needed in the set-up and control of commitments,
the inconsistencies in the coordination of
commitments and the possibilities for organizational
development that simplify communication and
control mechanisms. Business Action Theory
(Goldkuhl, 1996) has been proposed as a generic
model of business communication that explains
business processes as action and interaction, and can
be used as an interpretative framework for business
process reconstruction, evaluation and redesign.
Finally, DEMO (Dynamic Essential Modelling of
Organizations) provides a domain-independent
theory that describes and explains the
communicational dynamics of an organization
together with a modelling facility based on it (van
Reijswoud et al., 1999). DEMO considers the
business transaction as its key concept and views the
functioning of an organization from three levels,
namely the documental level, where the organization
is considered as a system of operators producing,
forwarding, storing and deleting documents, the
informational level, where the organization is
regarded as a system of processors that send, receive
and transform information, and the essential level,
where the organization is conceptualized as a
network of interrelated business transactions, which
in turn are composed of interrelated communicative
acts.
The above methodologies concentrate on the
representation of knowledge, but they do not
consider the knowledge creation process which is a
far more important issue. No matter how a richer
modelling formalism is used, if the process-related
knowledge is limited or incorrect, the model does
not correctly represent the real process.
On the other hand, IS infrastructure to support
people working in teams has been the subject of
interest for quite a long time. Such systems are
aiming at structuring group decision-making
processes and helping group members in reaching a
shared understanding of the issue by supporting
knowledge elicitation, knowledge sharing and
knowledge construction. Moreover, they exploit
intranet or internet technologies to connect decision-
makers in a way that encourages dialogue and
stimulate the exchange of tacit knowledge.
Representative systems falling in this category are
QUESTMAP (Conklin, 1996), EUCLID (Smolensky
et al., 1987), JANUS (Fischer et al., 1989), SEPIA
(Streitz
et al., 1989), QOC (Shum et al., 1993),
SIBYL (Lee, 1990), and BELVEDERE (Suthers,
2001). One can also add here attempts to use
Microsoft’s Netmeeting as a platform for combining
a chat-based dialogue with a simulation tool to
facilitate developer-client interactions during the
modelling process (Taylor, 2001), as well as
attempts to use tools of this category in connection
with static models (e.g. QUESTMAP in CM
(Sierhuis and Selvin, 1996)).
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