A Computational Framework for Designing Interleaved Workflow and Groupware Tasks

Organizations are adopting a variety of process coordination tools such as groupware and workflow management systems to support seamless process execution and streamline individual and group knowledge worker activities. Such process support systems are being deployed in organizations in an ad hoc manner without any overall guiding process design principles leading to additional costly overheads of systems modeling and software maintenance without the requisite benefits. This paper presents a conceptual framework illustrating a structured approach to organizational process design, providing effective task coordination and information management to address some of the relevant issues. Contributions of the research discussed in this paper include: a) a declarative AI planning based representation formalism to describe both individual and group activities, b) a structured top-down design process that enables the design of group and individual activities in an explicit manner, c) computational procedures to automate the generation of process design alternatives, role assignment to tasks, and support the detailed design of group activities. The feasibility of the integrated representation is evaluated based on extant literature on process models and case studies. The benefits of the formalism are evaluated by prototyping intelligent build-time tools for process design, and utilize the same in the design of processes for tasks such as new product development, requirements analysis, and drug discovery. This paper summarizes the work done so far as well as ongoing work by the author as a part of his doctoral dissertation

Assisting the Design of virtualwork processes via on-line reverse engineering

The design of virtual workplaces that can support virtual work processes has traditionally been either adhoc, or has been influenced by the virtual architecture or requirements engineering disciplines. The problem with these approaches is the difficulty in obtaining, and subsequently retaining and reusing, ready-made configurations of collaborative work processes. Such configurations naturally occur during the actual use of CVEs for conducting projects. Can we predict some elements of the evolution of a new collaborative process, based on similarities and analogies with processes formalised and supported before? Can we capture and utilise the evolutionary component in the workspace design process, so that we can provide better support to the developers of collaborative workspaces? The paper presents a new approach for supporting design and redesign of virtual workspaces, based on combining data mining techniques for refining lower level models with a reverse engineering cycle to create upper level models

Decision-enabled dynamic process management for networked enterprises

In todays networked economy face numerous information management challenges, both from a process management perspective as well as a decision support perspective. While there have been significant relevant advances in the areas of business process management as well as decision sciences, several open research issues exist. In this paper, we highlight the following key challenges. First, current process modeling and management techniques lack in providing a seamless integration of decision models and tools in existing business processes, which is critical to achieve organizational objectives. Second, given the dynamic nature of business processes in networked enterprises, process management approaches that enable organizations to react to business process changes in an agile manner are required. Third, current state-of-the-art decision model management techniques are not particularly amenable to distributed settings in networked enterprises, which limits the sharing and reuse of models in different contexts, including their utility within managing business processes. In this paper, we present a framework for decision-enabled dynamic process management that addresses these challenges. The framework builds on computational formalisms, including the structured modeling paradigm for representing decision models, and hierarchical task networks from the artificial intelligence (AI) planning area for process modeling. Within the framework, interleaved process planning (modeling), execution and monitoring for dynamic process management throughout the process lifecycle is proposed. A service-oriented architecture combined with advances from the semantic Web field for model management support within business processes is proposed

"It's cleaner, definitely": Collaborative Process in Audio Production.

Working from vague client instructions, how do audio producers collaborate to diagnose what specifically is wrong with a piece of music, where the problem is and what to do about it? This paper presents a design ethnography that uncovers some of the ways in which two music producers co-ordinate their understanding of complex representations of pieces of music while working together in a studio. Our analysis shows that audio producers constantly make judgements based on audio and visual evidence while working with complex digital tools, which can lead to ambiguity in assessments of issues. We show how multimodal conduct guides the process of work and that complex media objects are integrated as elements of interaction by the music producers. The findings provide an understanding how people currently collaborate when producing audio, to support the design of better tools and systems for collaborative audio production in the future

An Integrated Formal Task Specification Method for Smart Environments

This thesis is concerned with the development of interactive systems for smart environments. In such scenario different interaction paradigms need to be supported and according methods and development strategies need to be applied to comprise not only explicit interaction (e.g., pressing a button to adjust the light) but also implicit interactions (e.g., walking to the speaker’s desk to give a talk) to assist the user appropriately. A task-based modeling approach is introduced allowing basing the implementing of different interaction paradigms on the same artifact