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Outline

Title
Abstract
Introduction
Case That Illustrates the Problem
Supporting the Interaction Among Participants
Discussion
Related Work
Conclusions
References

Common Context for Decisions and their Implementations

Profile image of Marcos BorgesMarcos Borges

2006, Group Decision and Negotiation

Abstract

Decisions are frequently sent to implementers without the context that guided them. It should not be a surprise, then, that results are not as expected. The lack of supplementary information and a common context produces wrongly implemented or lost decisions. This paper proposes a solution to this problem based on groupware technology. In particular, a combination of tools including shared workspaces, process modeling with workflow and a discussion tool, is proposed. A case is used to illustrate the problem and its solution.

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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.

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Groupware systems allow users to be part of a shared environment in order to carry out groupwork. Members of a group belong to organizations in which each fulfills general and specific enterprise objectives. This paper presents a modeling proposal specially devised for the study of CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) systems and the subsequent development of groupware applications. This research work focuses on two specific models for the proposal: a conceptual domain model formalized through a domain ontology, and a system model built using a UML-based notation. The second stems from the first and each provides a Computation Independent View (CIV) with different objectives. Respectively, they allow a common vocabulary for knowledge sharing to be established, and organization functional requirements to be specified, particularly those concerning communication, coordination and collaboration.

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A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing the Use of Context in Groupware
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