Part III: Contents Of The Process Handbook
Chapter 8: What Is in the Process Handbook?
8.10 Classification Structure for Activities
It would be possible to use the generic kinds of business knowledge and the case examples we have already discussed without any further categorization. If one wants to find knowledge about a particular business function, for example, one could just find that business function in the MIT Business Activity Model and then look at its specializations. Or one could do
conventional searches of the knowledge base using names, keywords, or other dimensions like date, company, industry, and so forth.
It is also useful for human editors to be able to manually group Process Handbook entries in various ways to help readers find the things they want. We call such linkages navigation links, and the Handbook includes a number of them. For instance, there is a group of links to ''eBusiness Case Examples''that occur in various parts of the Handbook, and there are other manually created links to examples of various business functions (e.g., Procurement, Supply Chain Management, and Marketing). All these conventional ways of organizing and
searching the Process Handbook are certainly useful.
But some of the most powerful and interesting capabilities of the Process Handbook require more extensive use of the specialization hierarchy. For example, finding other entries that are ''like''a given entry (as shown in figure 8.2c) or finding ''distant analogies''(as described in chapter 12) depends on having the entries classified in a ''family tree''of increasingly general types of activities. These capabilities of the Process Handbook work only on activities that are classified in useful ways in the specialization hierarchy. Therefore, to take full advantage of these capabilities, it is desirable to have as many entries as possible classified in the specialization hierarchy.
To make this as easy as possible, the Process Handbook includes an extensive classification structure for the specialization hierarchy. This classification structure (including over 3,000 activities) provides ''logical''places for you to classify any business activity whatsoever. In fact, at its most general levels, this structure can even be used to classify any activities, whether or not they involve business.
To see how this structure works, let us start with an example of the 'Sell'activity we saw in section 8.3. Figure 8.13 shows all the direct and indirect generalizations of this activity (all its ''ancestors''in the specialization hierarchy). This figure uses the Compass Explorer view, which shows more information than the standard view in figure 8.2c, and shows the information in a different format.
Figure 8.13: Generalizations of 'Sell'(shown in the compass explorer view). The ''Ancestors''part of the figure shows the direct and indirect generalizations of 'Sell'. The ''Family tree''part of the figure also shows some of the other relatives of 'Sell'in the specialization hierarchy.
Since 'Sell'has two generalizations ('Exchange'and 'Provide'), two complete generalization paths for 'Sell'are shown in the ''Ancestors''part of the figure. The first path, for example, shows that 'Sell'is a specialization of 'Exchange'(with 'Sell'being in the bundle called 'Exchange how?'). 'Exchange', in turn, is a specialization of 'Move', and 'Move'is a
specialization of 'Modify'(in the 'Modify how?'bundle). And, finally, 'Modify'is a specialization of 'Act'. 'Act'is the most general activity of all. All the activities in the entire Process Handbook are either direct or indirect specializations of 'Act'.
But if 'Act'is the ''root''of all activities, what is the next level of specialization below 'Act'? Are there hundreds of different kinds of activities at the next level? We have actually organized the entire Process Handbook with only nine entries at the next level. We call all but one of these entries ''generic verbs.''
8.10.1 The Generic Verbs
Figure 8.14 shows the next level of specializations of 'Act'. The first eight of these entries are generic verbs: 'Create', 'Modify', 'Preserve', 'Destroy', 'Combine', 'Separate', 'Decide', and 'Manage'. The first four ('Create', 'Modify', 'Preserve', and 'Destroy') are actions that can occur for any object. The next two ('Combine'and 'Separate') are actions that can occur when multiple objects are involved. And the final two verbs ('Decide'and 'Manage') are informational actions that could have been included under the earlier verbs but that are given special emphasis here because of their importance in business. The last entry
'Unclassified'is simply a place to put entries that the author doesn't want to classify further (or which will be further classified at a later time). All these entries have many more levels of specialization. To illustrate what these further levels of specialization look like, the next two levels of specialization under the first entry, 'Create', are shown expanded in the figure.
Figure 8.14: First-level specializations of 'Act'(shown in the compass explorer view). The next two levels of specialization under 'Create'are also shown here.
8.10.2 Desirable Characteristics of the Generic Verbs
Where did these eight generic verbs come from? Is this the only way to organize a repository
like ours? Why should things be organized this way? We don't think that this is the only possible way to organize a repository like ours, but we believe this organizational structure has the same desirable characteristics we discussed earlier in section 8.5.1: it is
comprehensive,itis intuitively appealing, and it is theoretically based.
Perhaps the best way to see how the framework has these characteristics is to consider the process by which we developed the framework. We began by searching widely in the literature of linguistics, philosophy, library science, computer science, and elsewhere for an existing taxonomy of actions that we could use. We were unable to locate any existing taxonomy that seemed suitable for our purposes: comprehensive, parsimonious, broadly understandable, intuitively appealing, and potentially relevant to business.
We therefore embarked on the task of developing our own such taxonomy. Our first step was to find a comprehensive list of actions that would need to be encompassed by our taxonomy.
To do that, Jintae Lee (a member of our project team) located and searched an extensive on-line dictionary (more precisely, a ''lexical database'') called Wordnet that was developed by cognitive scientist George Miller and others at Princeton University (see
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/). Lee analyzed the dictionary to find all the verbs that did not have any generalizations (''hypernyms'') shown. This resulted in a list of about 100 to 200 verbs.
All the other verbs in the dictionary had generalizations, so they were all—directly or
indirectly—specializations of the verbs in this list. In a sense, then, this list of 100 to 200 verbs subsumed all the verbs in the English language represented in this on-line dictionary.
We next took this list and reduced it further by removing all the verbs that seemed to us to be direct specializations of other verbs already there. In other words, we removed words for which we felt a generalization had incorrectly been omitted in the on-line dictionary.
Then we continued refining the list of verbs by grouping the remaining verbs into hierarchies with more general verbs subsuming more specific ones. We did not insist, in these cases, that the general verbs be strict generalizations for all the verbs grouped under them, but we tried to make groupings for which there was at least a plausible, intuitive connection. For example, we grouped all the following verbs under 'Create': 'Build', 'Develop', 'Perform', 'Calculate', 'Duplicate', 'Forecast'. All these verbs are, in some sense, ways of creating things.
We continued in this way until we finally arrived at a hierarchical structure with the eight generic verbs shown above as the top level of our hierarchy and the more specialized verbs grouped hierarchically under them. As shown in figure 8.14, for example, the lower-level verbs ('Build', 'Develop', 'Perform', etc.) are now included in the Process Handbook at various levels of specialization below the highest-level generic verbs.
Of course, there was a substantial amount of subjective judgment in this grouping process.
Other reasonable people might certainly have made different choices about the details of how to group specific verbs. Even in cases where a given action might be sensibly classified in multiple ways, however, the value of the Process Handbook is not eliminated. You just get the benefits of all the connections that are represented, and not of the ones that are not.
Overall, we feel that this structure provides an intuitive and logical way of grouping all
possible actions that can be described in the English language. It thus, of course, includes all actions that can occur in business. We have now used this structure to classify thousands of entries developed by dozens of people, and we believe that all this experience provides substantial evidence that our theoretically based structure is comprehensive and intuitive.
8.10.3 Classifying All the Other Entries in the Process Handbook
To see how the generic verbs can be used to classify even the most detailed actions in business, consider the specializations of 'Create'shown in figure 8.15a. The figure shows how various views and case examples of negotiating contracts are all classified as ways of
''discussing''—which is in turn classified as a way of ''developing''which is itself classified as a way of ''creating.''Figure 8.15b shows how Produce as a business is also a specialization of 'Create'through the bundle called 'Create-views'.
As figure 8.15 illustrates, we have, in general, tried to maintain a branching factor of about ' plus or minus 2''in the specialization hierarchy. This number comes from the psychological study of the limits of human short-term memory[3], but we use it primarily as a rough
guideline for editing the Process Handbook. In general, also, we have tried to create logical groupings at each level. We have tried, for example, to create groupings at each level that include alternatives that seem ''comparable''to each other and that have roughly equal importance. Wherever possible, we have tried to create groupings that constitute a mutually exclusive and exhaustive partitioning of the possible specializations of that activity.
To visualize how all the elements of the Process Handbook are connected, recall the metaphor of the Process Compass (as described in chapter 1). From any activity in the repository, you can think about going in any of the four directions shown on the compass:
down to the parts of the activity, up to the activities of which this one is a part, right to the specializations of this activity, and left to the generalizations of this activity.
Using this metaphor, you can think of all the actions in the Process Handbook as a vast, interconnected web (see figure 8.16). The most general activity of all, 'Act', is at the far left and the next level of generic verbs is just to the right of it. Then the links spread out into a very complicated, tangled web of more and more specialized activities. This web includes, not just the classification structure, but all the business activities represented in the Process Handbook, all the way down, in principle, to even the most detailed things that go on in business.
Along the top fringe of the web are the various specializations of 'Produce as a business'.
These entries are at the top because many other things are part of them, but they are not part of anything else.
8.10.4 Naming Conventions for Activities
As you may have noticed in the figures so far, almost all of the activities in the Process Handbook have names that begin with a verb. Most of the activities also include other modifiers or objects as part of their names. Usually these additional parts of the name give information about some dimension of the activity, such as how, who, when, and where.
Some of the activities also include a further description in {curly brackets} after the name.
We use these bracketed suffxes for several purposes: (1) to represent the names of specific companies in case examples, (2) to give the source of models developed by other
organizations (e.g., the Supply Chain Council's SCOR model), and (3) to distinguish between any other easily confused activities that would otherwise have the same name.
While we have not followed these naming conventions in every single case, we have used them in all cases where we did not see some compelling reason to do otherwise. In general, we have found that these naming conventions are useful for several reasons: First, they result in lists of activities that seem consistent and comparable. Second, they emphasize the action-oriented perspective that is embodied in a structure based on activities. Third, they usually provide enough information in the names of activities shown in a list to allow one to determine which activity to examine in detail.
[3]George A. Miller, The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information, Psychological Review 63(1956): 81-97.