This paper reports on the first five years of work in a project to address these problems by (1) developing methodologies and software tools for representing and codifying organizational processes at varying levels of abstraction, and (2) collecting, organizing, and analyzing numerous examples of how different groups and companies perform similar functions. The result of this work is an on-line process handbook which can be used to help people: (1) redesign existing business processes, (2) invent new processes (especially those that take advantage of information technology), and (3) organize and share knowledge about organizational practices. We also expect this process handbook to be useful in automatically (or semiautomatically) generating software to support or analyze business processes, but that is not the focus of this paper (see Dellarocas 1996, 1997a, 1997b)
