Organizing Business Knowledge: The Mit Process Handbook

A systematic and powerful method for organizing and accessing business knowledge.

The vision of the MIT Process Handbook Project is the creation of a systematic and powerful method of organizing and sharing business knowledge. Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook presents the key findings of a multidisciplinary research group at MIT's Sloan School of Management that has worked for over a decade to lay the foundation for just such a comprehensive system. It does so by focusing on the process itself. The book proposes a set of fundamental concepts to guide analysis and a classification framework for organizing knowledge, and describes the publicly available online knowledge base developed by the project, which includes a set of representative templates and specific case examples as well as a set of software tools for organizing and sharing knowledge.

Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook includes twenty-one papers, some previously published and some appearing for the first time, that have come out of this decade-long project. Together, they form a comprehensive and coherent vision of the future of knowledge organization. The Handbook is organized into five parts: an introduction and overview; the presentation of a theory of process representation; "Contents of the Process Repository"; "Process Repository Uses," which gives examples from both research and practice; and a conclusion, which maps the progress so far and the challenges ahead.

George A. Herman is on the research staff at the Center for Coordination Science, and Managing Editor of the Process Handbook.