Multi-perspective modeling and analysis of cooperation processes

The success of an organization depends on its ability to cooperate internally and externally in its business processes. Cooperation processes, both within and between organizations, are thus of key importance to an organization. However, cross-functional cooperation in particular often suffers from problems such as communication gaps, conflicting goals and priorities, misunderstandings, and lack of long-term knowledge management. The capturing and evaluation of cooperation processes often focuses on an activity-oriented perspective of the process, leading to a bird’s eye view of the intended process, while neglecting the real process and its problem areas. In this thesis, the C O-MAP methodology for modeling and analyzing real cooperation processes is introduced. C O-MAP focuses on the process stakeholders and the impact of the cooperation processes on their work. To do so, C O-MAP provides a method for capturing the process stakeholders’ perspectives of the cooperation process in an informal process diagram. These informal process diagrams are then mapped into four different formal models, representing the strategic, activity-oriented, service-oriented, and information flow-oriented perspective of the process, respectively. The integration of these four perspectives provides a holistic representation of the process. Furthermore, CO-MAP provides means for the analysis of the formal models with respect to quality criteria and integrity constraints for cooperation processes that are also presented in this thesis. CO-MAP has been validated in five industrial case studies at four different small and mediumsized enterprises. In addition, C O-MAP has been employed to capture the cooperation and communication structures in a large cultural sciences research project, to demonstrate C OMAP’s transferability to different contexts.