Three case studies on business collaboration and process management.

摘要

The importance of collaboration has been recognized for more than 2000 years. While recent improvement in technology creates vast opportunities for collaboration, effective collaboration remains challenging as ad hoc teams work across time, geographical, language, and technical boundaries, and suffer from process inefficiency. My dissertation addresses part of these challenges by proposing theoretical frameworks for business collaboration and process management. Case study is used as a research strategy for this thesis and it consists of three studies.;The first study proposes a process modeling framework to support efficient process model design via model transformation and validation. First, we divide process modeling into three layers and formally define three layers of workflow models. Then, we develop a procedure for transforming a conceptual process model into its corresponding logical process model. Third, we create a validation procedure that can validate whether the derived logical model is consistent with its original conceptual model.;The second study proposes a framework for analyzing the relationship between interaction processes and collaboration efficiency in software issue resolution in open source community. We first develop an algorithm to identify frequent interaction process structures referred to as interaction process patterns. Then, we assess patterns' impact through a time-dependent Cox regression model. By applying the interaction process analysis framework to software issue resolution processes, we identify several patterns that are significantly correlated with collaboration efficiency. We further conduct a case study to validate the findings of pattern efficiency in software issue resolution.;The third study addresses the issue of suitability of virtual collaboration. Virtual collaboration seems to work well for some cases, but not for others. We define collaboration virtualization as the suitability for a task to be conducted virtually and propose a Collaboration Virtualization Theory (CVT) to explain collaboration virtualization. Three categories (i.e., task, technology, and team) of constructs that determine the suitability of collaboration virtualization are derived from a systematic literature review of related areas.;In summary, this dissertation addresses challenges in collaboration and process management, and we believe that our research will have important theoretical and practical impacts on the development of collaboration management systems.