Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
For the shared spaces technique to work efficiently in a BPS system, two
conditions should be fulfilled:
•
Shared spaces are properly structured. In a normal business environment, a person
participates in many process instances, and, often, in parallel. For the shared space
technique to work efficiently, he/she needs to understand the situation in a shared
space he/she is visiting at a glance, and quickly find all information related to the
task at hand.
•
Invitations should give process participants a clear understanding on why they
have been invited and what they are expected to do in each particular shared space.
Note that invitations to visit shared spaces in BPS systems have a different meaning
from that in social software. In the latter, invitations are not binding; a person invited
may not visit the shared space at all. In a BPS system, however, following an
invitation is mandatory or at least strongly recommended; otherwise the whole
communication /collaboration scheme will break down.
Naturally, getting an invitation does not constitute the only reason why a person
would like to visit a shared space. He/she can do it in an arbitrary manner, or because
some event happened in the frame of a process instance that is of value to be
registered in its shared space.
In the next three sections, we will introduce three examples of BPS systems that
use the principles outlined in this section.
3 A System with Collaborative Planning
3.1 Description
A system called ProBis was developed based on ideas from [5] for a Swedish interest
organization (The Swedish Union of Tenants ) in 2003-2006 as described in [8][9]. A
shared space in ProBis is presented to the end-user as a window divided in several
areas by using the tab dialogues technique, see Fig. 1.
Some areas of the window are standard, i.e. independent from the type of the
business process; others are specific for each process type supported by the system.
Standard areas comprise such attributes and links as:
•
Name and informal description of a process instance
Links to the owner, and, possibly, the process team
•
•
Links to the relevant documents, created inside the organization, and received from
the outside
The standard part of ProBis shared space includes also the task area (tab) that contains
two lists, as in Fig. 1. The
to-do
list (to the left in Fig. 1) includes tasks planned for
the given process instance; the
done
list (to the right in Fig.1) includes tasks
completed in the frame of it. A planned task defines what and when something should
be done in the frame of the process instance, as well as who should do it. All tasks
planned for a given person from all process instances are shown in the end-user's
personal calendar. From the calendar, the user can go to any shared space for which a
task is assigned to him/her in order to inspect, change, or execute this task.
