A Framework for Improving Knowledge-Intense Business Processes

This volume reports on the results of research into the development of a framework for the improvement of knowledge-intense business processes (KBPI). This framework is composed of three parts: an epistemology, which provides a working definition of the concept of knowledge and a theoretical foundation of the improvement framework; a business process ontology, used to describe a business process; and an improvement methodology, used to guide the improvement process. The framework was tested on three different business processes through the conduct of three case studies. The case study results show that the KBPI can be applied to the process analysis and improvement of a variety of business processes but is especially useful to those processes that are knowledge-intense.