Demonstrating Flexible Support for Knowledge-Intensive Processes with proCollab

Knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) are driven by knowledge workers utilizing their skills, experiences, and expertise. As these processes are emergent and unpredictable, their support constitutes a big challenge. For coordinating and synchronizing the various tasks of a KiPs, knowledge workers still rely on simple task lists like, e.g., to-do list or checklists. Though task lists are intuitive, their current implementations are very ineffective: tasks are neither made explicit nor are they personalized or synchronized. In addition, no task management lifecycle support is provided and media disruptions frequently occur. This tool demonstration presents the proCollab framework supporting a wide range of KiPs (e.g., projects and cases) through integrated, lifecycle-based task management. In particular, proCollab task trees support the provision of task list templates and to constitute digital task lists of any kind. For customization, it further allows integrating domain-specific methodologies as well as configuring task lists at design and run time. Overall, the proCollab framework shall improve coordination among knowledge workers, increase work awareness, and record valuable coordination efforts

Flexible Task Management Support for Knowledge-Intensive Processes

Knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) are driven by knowledge workers utilizing their skills, experiences and expertise. As KiPs are emergent and unpredictable by nature, their operational support is challenging. For coordinating and synchronizing their work, usually, knowledge workers rely on simple task lists like to-do lists or checklists. Though these instruments are intuitive and prevalent, their current implementations tend to be ineffective and error-prone. Tasks are neither made explicit nor are they synchronized. In addition, no task lifecycle support is provided and media disruptions aggravate task management. As a consequence, the efforts knowledge workers spent in task management are not exploited for optimizing future KiPs. This work presents the proCollab approach, focusing on its stateful and customizable components of processes, task trees, and tasks. proCollab processes may constitute KiPs in the shape of projects and cases, while generic task trees and tasks support required digital task lists of any kind. To enable domain-specific task support, the proCollab state management allows to integrate domain-specific procedure models (e.g., Scrum) and to enrich proCollab components with customized states. Finally, this customizable task management support fosters knowledge workers' coordination, increases work awareness, reduces media disruptions, and enables the reuse of valuable coordination efforts and knowledge

Design and Implementation of a Dynamic Web-based User Interface for the proCollab System Supporting Knowledge-intensive Business Processes

Globalization and the change to post-industrial societies have led to an increased value of knowledge-intensive processes. Areas creating and utilizing new knowledge, such as research and development are of high importance for today’s companies. In these areas, knowledge workers drive the creation of value in knowledge-intensive processes. However, there is still no established process-based support due to the dynamic nature of these processes. The latter requires a high level of communication and cooperation between all involved workers. The proCollab research project, hosted at Ulm University, aims to holistically support knowledge workers and knowledge-intensive processes. The concept of proCollab relies on the lifecycle-based task management in the context of processes. In particular, knowledge workers may use digital task lists to synchronize and coordinate their work more effectively. To demonstrate the capabilities of proCollab, a sophisticated proof-of-concept prototype has been developed. This work presents the design and implementation of the dynamic, web-based user interface of the current version of the proCollab prototype

Advanced Concepts for Task List Lifecycle Support

Globalization and the shift towards a knowledge-based society have increased the importance of knowledge work and in particular knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) in highly developed countries. As a result, knowledge workers demand suitable information systems supporting their collaboration in knowledge-intensive processes. However, due to their difficult characteristics, there is still no such adequate support for KiPs. A KiP-supporting system needs to provide digital, lifecycle-based task lists to ensure sustainable support. Today, knowledge workers usually organize and manage their collaborative work in a KiP using paper-based task lists, e.g. to-do lists or checklists. Although task lists are intuitive and widely used, their current implementations tend to be ineffective and error-prone. Task lists are neither synchronized nor accessible by several knowledge workers simultaneously. In addition, no task list lifecycle support is provided and media disruptions aggravate task management. As a consequence, the efforts of knowledge workers in task management are not exploited for the optimization of future KiPs. As part of the proCollab research project, this thesis addresses advanced concepts to support the task list lifecycle. For this purpose, existing lifecycle concepts are adapted and improved in particular. To allow an adequate comparison of task lists, an approach for a similarity analysis, on which the advanced concepts are based, is proposed first. As it is not always possible to create a suitable task list in advance, an approach for the automatic generation of a task list template from completed task list instances is presented. Furthermore, an approach for optimizing existing task list templates by incorporating the most frequent changes applied to task lists in use is explained. An additional approach for analyzing and identifying nested insert operations is proposed to extend and improve the optimization of existing task list templates. The presented concepts are together implemented in the current proCollab proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate their feasibility and applicability. Therefore, various services and a central REST interface as well as a comprehensive test framework are implemented