Business Process Management with Social Software:

Business Process Management with Social Software:

An Integrated Technology for Work Organisation

DSV, SU/KTH, Forum 100, 164 40 Kista, Sweden

{petia,martinh,ba,pajo@dsv.su.se}

Abstract. Software support for well structured business processes is today provided through workflow tech-nology and process management tools. Tailored to support well structured processes, these tools do not provide adequate support for loosely structured work activities such as knowledge intensive processes. This type of work is heavily reliant on professional knowledge, deals with large amounts of data and tasks that can be redone several times. The purpose of the project is to bring together state-of-the-art research in business process management systems and social software to design services and methodology for supporting loosely structured processes. This architecture will enable flexible process enactment, configurable and context-aware user interfaces, and service based task support.

1 Introduction

Organisations have used IT-based information systems since the 60s to support the communi-cation between actors within an enterprise. Often these systems were introduced to improve the internal efficiency of an organisation. Today, we see a development where information systems transcend this traditional role and become the hub in the communication and decision making of organisations. The information systems no longer support only the intra-organisational commu-nication but also inter-organisational commucommu-nication including customers, vendors, government, etc. This development is fuelled by technological innovations, such as the Internet, as well as organisational developments, such as globalisation. These trends result in demands for increas-ingly complex information systems that are capable of supporting the diverse and changing tasks of huge numbers of users in real time.

One major approach for addressing the complexity of information systems has been the in-troduction of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). While initially introduced as document routing systems dispatching documents in an organization (and traditionally referred to as workflow management systems, WFMSs), BPMSs have grown to manage complete pro-cesses in organizations. The scope has hence broadened from document routing to work distri-bution between human and non-human actors. In addition, the original narrow focus on intra-organizational process support has been widened to also include inter-intra-organizational collabora-tion processes.

While BPMSs were introduced already in the 1990s, a more recent trend in enterprise com-puting is the emergence of Social Software (SoS) systems. SoS are typically viewed as a set of web-based applications that allow users to interact and share data with each other in a free and unrestricted environment. However, as pointed out in [20], SoS cannot be fully defined in terms of their functionality but rather through the purpose they fulfil. [20] suggests that social software be defined as “systems that trigger mechanisms of sociality”, thereby focusing on the intended

and desired result of using such systems. Similarly, there does not exist any specific technologies for realising SoS, though they are often associated with blogs, wikis, tagging, and other forms of collaborative editing tools [19].

While BPMSs are implemented to support well-structured processes to which specific goals can be associated, SoS were primarily designed for providing a forum of interaction between users without any goal-oriented intentions. Examples of such systems are Facebook and Twitter, where users can present themselves, report on their activities and engage in different forms of interaction, including game playing and poking. However, other SoS aim at the production of specific artefacts, thereby inviting users to participate in goal-oriented activities. Such systems enable social production, where production is realised not through market mechanisms or hierar-chies but through voluntary contribution between actors in networks [24], with typical examples as Wikipedia and SourceForge.

SoS for supporting social production face many of the problems addressed by BPMSs, as both need to coordinate and manage goal oriented work activities carried out by several actors. However, SoS and BPMSs provide widely different mechanisms for achieving this coordination and management of work. While BPMSs are usually deployed to support structured work distri-bution and top-down management, the use of SoS is propelled by the initiative and motivation of the process participants themselves. Therefore, a promising line of research is to investigate how BPMSs and SoS can be integrated in order to combine their respective benefits.

2 Problem Statement

While the benefits of business process management systems are well known, their potential to support less structured work situations, such as loosely structured and knowledge intensive work, has not been reached [6]. A main reason for this state of affairs is that BPMSs are based on very specific assumptions. In a typical BPMS, process models are designed once and then enacted several times. This means that the most natural application area for most BPMSs is routine and repetitive work procedures that can be standardised for an entire organisation. In contrast, loosely structured and knowledge intensive work is exploratory, flexible, non-repetitive and can only to a limited extent be specified in advance of execution. Thus, control-flow oriented process models and classical BPMSs are not well suited for these kinds of activities. A number of specific problems are the following, as identified in [3, 6]:

– Lack of context. A workflow system focuses on the control flow between activities within a single case. Thereby, the context of the case, including data related to the entire case and not only to individual activities, is moved into the background and is not easily accessible to process workers.

– Inflexible decomposition of work activities.In order to manage work distribution, a workflow system needs to decompose work into large-grained activities that are considered to be atomic by the system. However, they are not atomic for the user, who needs to carry out the actual work at a much more fine-grained level.

– No differentiation between work distribution and authorization.A workflow system uses rout-ing for both work distribution and authorization. As a consequence, a person is not authorized

to do anything except the work-items that have been explicitly distributed to her. This is ob-viously unsatisfactory, as supervisors and managers often need to do work distributed to their subordinates.

– Push oriented perspective.Routing in a workflow system tells workers what they areobliged

to do rather than what they areableto do in a certain situation. Such a push oriented perspec-tive gives rise to rigid and inflexible processes.

– Single case focus.A typical BPMS supports only work within one single case and is not able to handle interrelationships between different cases.

In order to overcome the problems listed above, BPMSs need to be complemented by other types of software systems. One promising type of systems is SoS that should be able to address most of the problems listed above. However, experiences from and applications of SoS for goal oriented activities are still quite limited except for the area of open source software development. Furthermore, ways of working as well as technologies for BPMSs and SoS are widely different. It is, therefore, a non-trivial task to make BPMS and SoS interoperable.

3 Project Goal

The main goal of the project is to design a set of generic services for making BPMS and SoS interoperable, thereby enabling the construction of process oriented systems that are able to ad-equately support loosely structured and knowledge intensive work. Furthermore, the project will develop a methodology for designing workflow systems that combine mechanisms from both BPMS and SoS. The result of the project will be a set of services for integrating BPMSs and SoS, an associated methodology, and a proof-of-concept implementation. The implementation will make use of standard technologies and will be based on established open source software components, thereby ensuring openness, flexibility, and configurability.

4 Related Work

Main areas of research in the BPMSs domain are towards: (i) verification, (ii) simulation, (iii) configuration, (iv) dynamic flexibility and exception handling, and (v) process mining.

– Verification deals with the construction of algorithms for analysing the properties of process models and the ability to discover structural problems such as deadlock and livelocks in models.

– Simulations are used to study the behaviour of a system configured with process models. Based on matematical calculation, they exhibit how a big number of cases and influence on factors such as cost, time and resource utilization.

– Configuration addresses the reuse of process models. It spans both work on systematizing generic knowledge into reference modles as well as on the adoption (i.e. the configuration) of these models for specific scenarios.

– The work on dynamic flexibility and exception handling aims at extending the workflow technology to deal with process specifications changing during execution time either as a result from unforseen exceptions or due to evolution of the business processes supported with

a BPMS. This area of research addresses the widely spread critique on workflow technology on their rigidity and infelxibilty.

– The research in process mining focuses on the development of algorithms for deriving process models based on execution logs containing data on work activities performed in an organisa-tion.

The work we propose here does not fit neatly into any of the main research areas listed above. Through integrating BPMSs with SoS, we aim at exploring the area of business process manage-ment in a novel way. In the last five years, a rapid developmanage-ment is evident in the area of SoS and open source software development resulting in widely spread application of wikis, blogs, Internet discusion forums, collaborative editors, etc. By turning our attention to this kind of software and employing SoS design principles, we hope to extend workflow systems with adequate support for loosely structured and knowledge intensive work.

Existing workflow management systems, content management systems, CSCW systems and business process management systems all have weaknesses when it comes to the support of knowledge intensive and loosely structured processes. Contemporary workflow and business pro-cess management systems (such as Tibco iPropro-cess Suite, Oracle BPEL Propro-cess Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server) for highly structured processes, do not provide the functionality re-quired for knowledge intensive work as discussed in Section 2. Neither are content management systems with workflow functionality (e.g. Alfresco combined with jBPM), or CSCW systems sufficient for this purpose. They provide adequate document versioning and audit trail support, but are structured to support workflows of individual and not for groups of related documents.

Relevant research in the area of workflow support for loosely structured processes is cur-rently carried out at Technical University of Eindhoven where a declarative, constraint language for workflow specifications called Declare [5] has been specified and an open source tool sup-porting it has been developed. A solution for workflow support for knowledge intensive processes has been proposed in the CASE-handling approach [3] (implemented by Pallas Athena) where data is treated as first class citizens where a process progresses, among others, based on the available information, and not as traditionally based on the executed tasks. However, even if, case handling systems [3], come closest to the requirements outlined for knowledge intensive processes outlined above, they do not currently cope with the execution of a task by multiple actors. Furthermore, they do not provide support for interleaved instance flows.

Some other recent approaches for handling loosely structured and knowledge intensive work processes are KnowMore [4], which provides context specific information support during run-time; PRIME [13], which provides a separation of tasks and information needs, which makes it more flexible; CBRFlow [21], which addresses the criticized lack of flexibility in workflow systems by providing the user with the possibility to enter state facts about current situations.

Our own contribution in the area includes an extensive analysis on existing process modeling languages (e.g. UML 2.0 AD [9, 17] and BPMN [10]), standards for process orchestration (e.g. BPEL4WS [7] and BPML [1]), and workflow management systems (i.e., jBPM, OpenWFE and EnhydraShark [22, 11]). This work has been carried out in cooperation with Queensland Uni-versity (QUT) of Technology and Eindhoven Technical UniUni-versity (TuE). Furthermore, we have done extensive research on integration of process support with knowledge management [14].

The research was primarily focused on understanding information demand and tool support for loosely structured processes.

We have also made initial work on the integration of BPMS and SoS in [16], which proposes a set of design principles for managing work activities through a combination of BPMS and SoS mechanisms. This paper was published in the The First Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software, the objective of which was to explore how social software and social production interact with business process management, how business process management has to change to comply with social production, and how business processes may profit from social techniques (http://crinfo.univ-paris1.fr/users/nurcan/BPMS2/).

5 Solution Approach

The project will design a set of services for integrating BPMS and SoS as well as an associated methodology. Using these services, process oriented solutions can be built that offer a number of advantages:

– Flexible task and process enactment.Solutions will rely on mechanisms from case handling, meaning that resource events, such as the creation and modification of resources, will be used to drive processes forwards. In contrast to case handling, solutions will also make use of control-flow oriented process models. This will enable a process to be driven forwards by process events, i.e. events that signal task initiation and completion and are generated directly by actors as a consequence of performing tasks [15]. By combining case handling with control-flow oriented process models, solutions will enable users to work on individual tasks in a flexible way while retaining process control on a high level. For example, multiple users will be able to work simultaneously on the execution of a single task.

– Configurable and context-aware user interfaces.User interface based on the services devel-oped in the project will provide workers with a context of the processes they are working on. Context information refers to information related to particular tasks, cases, collections of cases, and resources. This information is not encoded in a process design but affects the execution of a process. Solutions will provide storing, processing, and retrieving facilities for contextual information. User interfaces, for both managers and knowledge workers, will have the capability to present relevant context information.

– Service oriented task support.Solutions will enable task support through services. This means that when a worker is about to carry out a task, she shall not have to execute a specific applica-tion for this purpose. Instead, the resource she needs to manipulate will be available through a service that is made accessible by being embedded in the user interface. This solution will contribute to the context-awareness of the user interface and also reduce the push oriented perspective of classical WFMSs by offering the worker easy access to any tasks she is able to carry out.

It is envisaged that process oriented solutions will be assembled through composing services of-fering functionality from BPMS and SoS, as outlined in Figure 1. The service composition can be carried out using any technology, thereby ensuring openness and flexibility. The project will

Files Social Software BPM systems Editor Engine Admin Tool Work List Handler Wikis Collaborative editors Work Environment Discussion Forums Data Base Data Base External appl. BPMS Services persists invokes persists Blogs SoS Services Users Interface services

Fig. 1.Integration of BPM and SoS systems

identify and design a number of services for exposing BPMS and SoS functionality. For BPMS, services will provide the ability to get information about the status of cases and work items, to start and end cases, to check in and out work items, to execute work items, to assign work items to resources, etc. For SoS, services will provide the ability to gain access to shared resources, to get information about the context of shared resources, to identify relevant resources, to comment on and discuss resources, to support social navigation, etc. When designing process oriented solutions, it is a non-trivial task to determine the distribution of work between BPMS and SoS mechanisms. Therefore, the project will also develop a methodology for creating solutions by composing BPMS and SoS services. A starting point for this methodology is the observation that both BPMS and SoS provide mechanisms for managing work activities, such as resource allocation, information distribution, planning, authorization, accountability allocation, monitor-ing, controllmonitor-ing, evaluation, and rewarding [12]. BPMS provide mechanisms of control flow, data flow and process flow, while SoS employe mechanisms like self identification, logging, signing and discussion. The methodology to be developed will provide guidance for selecting appropri-ate BPMS or SoS mechanisms for managing different work activities. The project will build a proof of concept implementation of a larger case using the services designed.

6 Work Plan

The project will be structured into the following major tasks:

1. Elicitation of requirements for the proposed services and methodology. This will done by collecting a set of examples of loosely structured and knowledge intensive processes and an-alyzing them to ensure that relevant requirements for the intended services and methodology are identified.(Months 1 - 6)

2. Analysis of existing approaches for managing loosely structured and knowledge intensive processes. Existing approaches, primarily those identified in Section 4, will be analyzed in order to identify components that can be adopted for the proposed services and methodology.

3. Design of services and methodology for systems supporting loosely structured and knowl-edge intensive processes. The services and methodology shall satisfy the requirements elicited in task 1 and make use of the components identified in task 2.(Months 7 - 18)

4. Proof-of-concept implementation based on the proposed services and methodology. The im-plementation will result in a system for supporting loosely structured and knowledge inten-sive processes.(Months 13 - 24)

5. Test and evaluation. The implementation will be deployed for a real case on a limited scale. The experiences from this deployment will be used to evaluate the proposed services and methodology.(Months 25 - 27)

6. Improved services and methodology design. Based on the experience gained from the pre-vious task, the proposed services and methodology will be further developed and improved.

(Months 27 - 36)

The system YAWL [2, 25] will be used for the process engine in the proof-of-concept implemen-tation. The choice of YAWL is based on two factors. First, YAWL is, to our knowledge, the most powerful workflow management system with respect to language suitability to BPM [18, 23]. The YAWL language and system is based on ten years of research in the area and is currently under continuous research and development. Secondly, we have a successful and well documented co-operation with the research group of YAWL [1, 17, 10, 7, 9, 22, 8, 11], which we aim to continue and strengthen through this project.

7 Benefits

The proposed project will bring a number of benefits to the Business Process Management re-search area:

– an improved understanding of the requirements for loosely structured and knowledge inten-sive process support and management;

– an improved understanding of the capabilities of BPMS and SoS for managing work activi-ties, and how to combine and balance these;

– an improved understanding of the types of services needed for offering BPMS and SoS func-tionality and making them interoperable.

The main beneficiaries are organisations and workers involved in loosely structured and knowl-edge intensive processes. The primary use of the proposed architecture is for supporting the per-formance of loosely structured and knowledge intensive processes. Furthermore, the architecture will facilitate the transfer of knowledge within and between organisations.

8 Cooperation

The project will continue the ongoing cooperation with the research group of YAWL (http: //www.yawlfoundation.org/community/team.php)lead by Prof. ter Hofstede from QUT and Prof. van der Aalst from TuE and QUT.

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