A Cognitive Framework for Knowledge-based Process Design

We propose a framework for redesigning knowledge-intensive business processes that is inspired by the knowledge-based theory of the firm, and based on ideas from cognitive science. It views a business process as a problem-solving task consisting of five phases: recognition, decomposition, planning, action and evaluation. The coordination of these tasks among multiple agents is viewed as distributed cognition. We give some general principles for identifying process improvements based on manipulating these phases