A Structured Approach to Designing Interleaved Workflow and Groupware Tasks

Modern organizations are investing in organizational process coordination tools such as groupware and workflow 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. Processes are designed and managed independently for each system, resulting in large administration overheads to coordinate activities in business processes that use these systems. This paper reports on the development of a unified framework to design distributed organizational processes that interleave both individual and group activities for a seamless flow of information, promote efficient information sharing and effective task execution and improve the quality of decision making. Though process modeling for workflow and groupware systems has been treated as separate tasks in the extant literature, we provide a declarative AI planning based framework for enabling organizational process design based on recent developments of thinkLets for collaborative engineering and case-based reasoning for workflow design. We illustrate our framework in the context of designing processes to support new product development and describe a prototype system currently under development.