Supporting Business Process Design Through a Web 2.0 Process Repository

Various process reference models have been developed by system vendors, consulting firms, and academic researchers to facilitate business process design. Although these reference models complement each other in terms of scope and contents, research on leveraging multiple reference models to support process design has been scant. In addition, it is difficult to efficiently search, discover, and share process knowledge in those reference models, which greatly hinders their usability. This research gap is largely due to a lack of innovative tools for managing process knowledge. In this paper, we bridge this gap by designing and developing a Web 2.0 Process Repository (WPR) to integrate and manage process knowledge from multiple sources. Several innovative features of WPR, such as a collaborative multi-facet process classification framework and case-based process design support, are discussed. A prototype system is developed to demonstrate WPR.