Supporting process design for e‐business via an integrated process repository

Business process design is an integral part of e‐business engineering. Given that e‐business models usually involve a wide range of business processes across different business functions with complex activities, events, and documents, process design for e‐business is a very challenging task. Although various process reference models (PRMs) have been developed to provide guidelines for process design, research on leveraging multiple PRMs to support process design for e‐business has been scant. In this paper, we demonstrate that the diverse process design requirements in e‐business are best satisfied by utilizing multiple PRMs via a case study. Then, we propose a collaborative approach grounded in knowledge management theory to integrating multiple process reference models to better support process design in e‐business. We equip the integrated process repository with a set of novel features based on Web 2.0 technologies to enhance its utility, efficiency, and quality for process design support. A prototype system is developed and user experiments are conducted to evaluate the system.