Cooperative Processes and Workflow Management for Enterprise Integration

Emerging organisational alternatives to hierarchy and extreme division of labour are changing the landscape of the organisational culture and practice. Most concepts march far away from the taylor-fordist tradition and have one element in common: they are the result of focusing on processes rather than on functional responsibilities [3,4,12,13]. These processes are either primary processes or operational processes, i.e., material, informational and relational/communicative business processes [11,12,13], or the change processes, i.e., continuous improvement and redesign processes.All processes are always challenged by the dramatic changes within the general setting (competition, new technologies, new public regulations, etc.) as well as by local breakdowns (accidents, disturbances, variances, etc.). In all cases real persons in the organisation have the duty to detect, avoid and absorb changes and breakdowns and to re-design or reassess the process and the way to deal with change and breakdowns. Re-design and control of a process is possible only if people have enough knowledge of the process. People working in processes have to have the process in their mind to guarantee the achievement of its goals.Management structures and process innovation (process management structures) are becoming important. Process owners, project team, continuous improvement teams, quality teams and others are examples of these tendencies. Meaningful business process are often run by new patterns of macrostructure like project structures, divisional structures, brand organisations, matrix organisations, etc.The developments from Tayloristic work organisations towards process-oriented structures will be shown as they are presently being demanded and tested. The scope of the paper is to motivate the analysis and design of business processes as co-operative workflows in the language/action perspective.