Prescriptive Workflow Design for Collaboration-intensive Processes using the Collaboration Engineering Approach

Abstract

Modern organizations are investing in organizational process coordination tools such as collaboration support systems and workflow management systems for better decision-making and business process execution. However, these systems are deployed in a standalone manner with the result that business processes that span these systems are highly fragmented. Work processes are designed and managed independently for each system, resulting in large administration overheads to coordinate activities in business processes that use these systems. Lack of a structured approach to modeling and designing collaborative work processes has been attributed as a primary reason for this disconnect. In this regard, this paper reports on the advances in the area of Collaboration Engineering and its applicability in designing collaborative workflows that can lead to a unified approach for designing organizational processes consisting of interleaved individual and collaborative tasks. The paper also motivates the need for an interface between the workflow activities and the more detailed collaboration support prescriptions.