Thomas Malone
URL = http://cci.mit.edu/malone/index.html
Thomas Malone has developed a Coordination Theory to study flows in businesses, and focuses on cooperation in business environments.
Bio [1] :
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and was one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century". Professor Malone teaches classes on leadership and information technology, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.
For example, Professor Malone predicted, in an article published in 1987, many of the major developments in electronic business over the last decade: electronic buying and selling, electronic markets for many kinds of products, "outsourcing" of non-core functions in a firm, and the use of intelligent agents for commerce. The past two decades of Professor Malone’s research are summarized in his critically acclaimed book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). This book has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portugese, and Spanish.
Professor Malone has also published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters; he is an inventor with 11 patents; and he is the co-editor of three books: Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology (Erlbaum, 2001), Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2003), and Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook (MIT Press, 2003).
Bio from http://ccs.mit.edu/malone/
Coordination Theory
“Thomas Malone: What I mean by coordination theory is that body of theory and principles that help explain the phenomena of coordination in whatever systems they arise. Now what do I mean by coordination? We define coordination as the management of dependencies among activities. Now how do we proceed on the path of developing coordination theory? The work we've done so far says that if coordination is the managing of dependencies among activities, a very useful next step is to say: what kinds of dependencies among activities are possible? We've identified three types of dependencies that we call atomic or elementary dependency types. Our hypothesis is that all the dependencies, all the relationships in the world, can be analyzed as either combinations of or more specialized types of these three elementary types. The three are: flow, sharing, and fit. Flow occurs whenever one activity produces some resource used by another activity. Sharing occurs when a single resource is used by multiple activities. And fit occurs when multiple activities collectively produce a single resource. So those are the three topological possibilities for how two activities and one resource can be arranged. And each of them has a clear analog in the world of business or any of the other kinds of systems we talked about.
Flow is probably the most obvious. It happens all over the place, and in some ways is the most elementary of all. Sharing also happens a lot whenever you've got one resource shared by multiple people or activities, whether that resource is a machine on a factory floor, a budget of money, or a room, or whatever needs to be used potentially by multiple activities. The least obvious is the last one called fit. A good example of where that occurs would be if you have engineers designing a car. One engineer is designing the engine, another engineer designing the body, and so forth. There's a dependency between the activities of those engineers that arises from the fact that all of the pieces have to fit together in the same car. So the idea is that, for each of these types of dependencies, there's a family of possible coordination processes that can be used to manage it. For instance, with a sharing dependency, one way of managing that is by first come, first served. Another way of managing that is by priorities: the [people with the] highest-priority activity get to use the resource as long as they need it, as long as there's no other higher-priority activity there. And for each of the other types of dependencies you can have a similar kind of family of coordination processes for managing them, some of which are centralized, some of which are decentralized."
(http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Malone2001.html)
Open Business Process Initiative
OPHI is a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to developing an on-line collection of knowledge about business processes that is freely available to the general public under an innovative form of "open source" licensing. More info at: http://ccs.mit.edu/ophi/index.htm
Wikipedia bio is at [2]
Interview with Thomas Malone at http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Malone2001.html