What if, rather than relying on an employer or the government to meet their human needs, individual workers joined independent organizations whose primary purpose was to provide stable "homes" as they moved from job to job? We call these organizations "guilds" by analogy to the craft...

Revised October 1998 <p>This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an on-line...</p>

January 1997 <p>A In 1994, the Sloan School of Management at MIT inaugurated a multi-year research and education initiative called "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century." One of the key activities for this initiative has been developing a series of coherent scenarios of possible future...</p>

This paper characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory , that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations,...

This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign, enterprise modeling, and software development. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an...

This paper describes a new project intended to provide a firmer theoretical and empirical foundation for such tasks as enterprise modeling, enterprise integration, and process re-engineering. <p>The project includes (1) collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes,...</p>

This paper examines the use of a groupware technology--Lotus Development Corporation's Notes® --in the context of customer support to understand how the technology was used to enable organizational changes over time. Building on its successful implementation of the technology two years ago, the...

We analyze pricing strategies for digital information goods, such as those increasingly available via the Internet. Because perfect copies of such goods can be created and distributed almost costlessly, any single positive price for copies is likely to be socially inefficient. However, we show...

The business value of information technology (IT) has been debated for a number of years. Some authors have found large productivity improvements attributable to computers, as well as evidence that IT has generated substantial benefits for consumers. However, others continue to question whether...

In this paper, we present an alternative way of thinking about technological change in organizations. This alternative approach is motivated by a recognition that traditional models for managing technological change - in which the major steps of the change are defined in advance and the...