1College of Business and Information Systems, Dakota State University, 820 N. Washington Avenue, Madison, SD 57042, USA. Email: amit.deokar@dsu.edu
2Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, 2628 BX Delft, The Netherlands. Email: g.l.kolfschoten@tudelft.nl
3College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1110 South 67th Street, Omaha, NE, 68182, USA. Email: gdevreede@mail.unomaha.edu
Modern organizations are investing in organizational process coordination tools such as collaboration support systems and workflow management 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. Work processes are designed and managed independently for each system, resulting in large administration overheads to coordinate activities in business processes that use these systems. Lack of a structured approach to modeling and designing collaborative work processes has been attributed as a primary reason for this disconnect. In this regard, this paper reports on the advances in the area of Collaboration Engineering and its applicability in designing collaborative workflows that can lead to a unified approach for designing organizational processes consisting of interleaved individual and collaborative tasks. The paper also motivates the need for an interface between the workflow activities and the more detailed collaboration support prescriptions.
collaboration, collaboration engineering, flexibility, process design, thinkLet, workflow
