Designing Workflow Management Systems for Virtual Organizations: An Empirically Grounded Approach

The extant literature on business process re-engineering has reported extensively on process automation and reengineering for regular organizations. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to transient organizational structures such as virtual teams. This study examines how a virtual team can benefit from workflow management systems. Our point of departure is an empirical analysis of the communication patterns and problems in an existing virtual team. The analysis indicates that the communication activities in the team are heavily skewed in time, on subjects, and towards certain team members. This causes overload, bottlenecks and other types of dysfunctionality. We suggest how the communication patterns can be reengineered through a set of Web-based information technology solutions.