The APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) is a member-supported, non-profit research center into business processes and "best practices". I put scare quotes around "best practices" because it's such an abused term that it basically means nothing, but APQC's Process Classification Framework, which is basically an open-source business process design framework, looks like a pretty nice document.

Let me put it this way: reading it, I'm already feeling more managerial. Anyway, this is the kind of thing that should be part of "Business Management for Dummies". Remember Charlie Stross's Accelerando, with its corporations whose bylaws were expressed in Python? The APQC-PCF is how that would work.

SAP also embodies a set of best practices, at least in the ERP realm, but for much larger companies than a startup. A hypothetical incubation tool, or startup library, would do something like that for newbies.

Am I still being stupid? Sometimes it's hard to tell. Has anybody had any experience with open-source business process standards? I should disambiguate that noun phrase: open-source (business process standards) is what I'm talking about.