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digital natives [3] fully integrated into a multitude of social networks and continuously
using shared spaces. The trend of using shared spaces for communication concerns the
area of business processes in the highest degree [4].
We believe that proper employment of shared spaces in BPS systems requires good
understanding of how such spaces enable communication and what kind of
advantages and limitations they have. Therefore, we undertake an attempt to identify
important styles of communication via shared spaces.
The goal of this paper is twofold. The first sub-goal is to present our experience of
building, introducing in the operational practice, and using BPS systems based on the
shared spaces architecture. The second sub-goal is to analyze this experience in order
to create a preliminary taxonomy of various communication styles in systems with
shared spaces architecture.
In order to create a proper foundation for the later considerations, we start with
reviewing the role of shared spaces in BPS systems (Section 2). We also explain how
a system that employs shared spaces differs from a traditional business process
support system based on workflow.
The first sub-goal of the paper is achieved by discussing three examples of
applications aimed at supporting collaboration/communication in the frame of
business process instances (Sections 3-5). All three systems have been built based on
the state-oriented view on business processes [5], and all of them use shared spaces to
facilitate communication between process participants. The systems employ three
different ways of using shared spaces for communication. The first system uses
collaborative planning. In the second one, communication is based on the specialized
structure of shared spaces. In the third one, the communication is based on changes in
the status of processes.
The way of using shared spaces in each of the systems is not arbitrary but reflects
the types of business processes each system supports. In the first case, the system
supports loosely-structured processes that require much ad-hoc communication
between people engaged in them. In the second case, the system supports relatively
structured processes. In the third case, the system supports simple real-time processes
with high requirements on the speed of communication.
The second sub-goal of the paper is achieved by analyzing the differences between
the systems in respect of how the invitations to visit shared spaces are issued (Section
6). Based on this analysis, three binary parameters are introduced to differentiate
communication styles in systems with shared spaces architecture.
In the last part of the paper, we give a short overview of related works (Section 7),
and discuss our experience and draw plans for the future research based on it (Section
8). As the paper is an experience report, in the “Related works” section, we pay
special consideration to list our own works that explain the theoretical background of
our experience as well as give the possibility for the reader to learn about some parts
of our experience in more details.
2 A Role of Shared Spaces in BPS Systems
There exist numerous definitions of what a business process is, each of them focusing
on a particular property of business processes. For the sake of this paper, we take the
following view on business processes:
