CEPE: a cooperative editor for processes elicitation

Abstract

Companies nonnally hire extemal consultants to carry out their Business Process Re-engineering. While this can be straightforward in the short tenn, it does not produce the desired result on the mid and long tenns. A low leveI of workers' involvement with a consequent resistance to changes, and a continuous dependency on extemal consultancy are the main drawbacks. We propose an altemative approach to BPR, specifically to Workflow Design, where company workers play an active and important role in re-designing the organization's processes in a cooperative style. The paper describes the essence of a BPR method based on participatory design and stepwise refinement, which we believe, will generate better results than the traditional approach. We also present CEPE -Cooperative Editor for Processes Elicitation -, which is a cooperative graphic editor that supports the processes knowledge building. That is the second phase of the proposed method.