Jack Hirschfeld writes:
"Can George (or someone else) describe the work of Business Design
Associates? What is their unique approach? Where can someone (me, for
example) learn more?"
I don't know a lot about BDA; however, I do know that BDA was founded by
Fernando Flores in order to pursue his ideas of language/action and his
ontology of business management. BDA was founded to do consulting, while
Action Technologies was founded to produce the technology. There are a
variety of works on the subject, many of them are rather hard to find.
Below is a list of some of them.
Medina-Mora, Raul, Terry Winograd, Rodrigo Flores, Fernando Flores, The
ActionWorkflow Approach to Workflow Management Technology, Proceedings of
the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Nov,1992.
Scherr, Alan L., A New Approach to Business Processes, IBM Systems
Journal, Vol 32, No 1, 1993.
Center, Kathy R. and Suzanne Henry, A New Paradigm for Business Processes,
in The Workflow Conference on Business Process Technology Workbook, 1993.
Center, Kathy R. and Cinthia Scoggins, Cultural Transformation Through the
Workflow Paradigm, in The Workflow Conference on Business Process
Technology Workbook, 1993.
Winograd, Terry, A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of
Cooperative Work, Hum. Comput. Interaction, 3, 1, (1987-88) 3-30.
Flores, C. Fernando, Management and Communications in the Office of the
Future, PhD Dissertation, Univ. of Calif., Berkley, 1982.
Flores, Fernando & Juan Ludlow, Doing and Speaking in the Office, In DSS:
Issues & Challenges, G. Fick & R. Sprague, 95-118, Permagon, 1981.
Flores, Fernando, Micheal Graves, Brad Hartfield and Terry Winograd,
Computer Systems and the Design of Organizational Interaction, ACM Trans.
Off. Info. Sys. 6, 2, 153-172, 1988.
Kensing, Finn, and Terry Winograd, The Language/Action Approach to Design
of Computer Support for Cooperative Work: A Preliminary Study in Work
Mapping, Proc of the IFIP TC8 Conf. on Collaborative Work, Social
Communications and Information Systems, Helsinki, Finland, 27-29, Aug,
1991.
Thomas White & Layna Fischer (Eds.), New Tools for New Times: The Workflow
Paradigm, Future Strategies, Inc., Alameda, Calif., 1994,
The core of the language/action theory can be found in the dense and
somewhat-overly-philosophical but often cited book:
Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and
Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, Addison-Wesley, 1987.
The language/action approach draws heavily on the work of John Searle, the
most relevant is:
Searle, John R., A Classification of Illocutionary Acts, Language in
Society, 5,1-23,1975.
-- Steve Taylor SST @ Workframe.com (617) 497-1222