A Technology for Pattern-Based Process Design and its Application to Collaboration Engineering - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 4

(Alexander, 1979). Alexander's design patterns
are used to design towns and buildings, but the
design pattern concept was adopted in various
other domains, including software engineering
(Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, 1995;
Lukosch & Schümmer, 2006; Rising, 2001),
workflow management (Aalst et al., 2003), e-
learning (Niegemann & Domagk, 2005), Project
management (Khazanchi & Zigurs, 2007), and
Collaboration Engineering (Kolfschoten, Briggs,
Vreede, Jacobs, & Appelman, 2006; Vreede,
Briggs, & Kolfschoten, 2006).
While a pattern language offers support in
documenting and sharing best practices in process
design and process support, it does not directly
offer support on how to use these best practices.
Design patterns are currently shared in topics
(Coplien & Harrison, 2005; Schümmer & Luko-
sch, 2007), or libraries on the internet (Hillside,
2008a; Yahoo, 2008). Therefore, to increase the
usefulness of a pattern language and to evolve
it to being more than a mere database of best
practices, this chapter explores tool support for
pattern-based design efforts. Such tools exist
for software design patterns (Budinsky, Finnie,
Vlissides, & Yu, 1996), and some social software
could offer a starting point for such tools, such
as wiki software (Hillside, 2008b). In the field of
software engineering where design patterns have
been adopted successfully as a way to share best
practices, the use of Computer Aided Software
Engineering (CASE) tools has been an important
development. The IEEE standard for the adoption
of CASE tools describes three gains from the use
of CASE tools: increased design productivity,
improvements in the quality of the software pro-
duced and improved consistency and uniformity
of the design approach (IEEE Std 1348, 1995).
Process design and deployment could gain from
the development of a similar class of tools which
we will label a Computer Aided Process Engi-
neering tools, CAPE tools. Like a CASE tool, a
CAPE tool is expected to increase process design
productivity, process quality and consistency and

uniformity of the process design and deployment
approach.
Process analysis and design are often aimed at
process change or improvement. Approaches to
process improvement (Total Quality Management,
Six Sigma, Deming Cycle, Capability Maturity,
etc.) are not linear but cyclic, to support that les-
sons learned, measured performance and experi-
ence feed back to improve the best practices they
were built upon. Therefore, a natural extension of
a CAPE tool would be to integrate it with tools
for management and evaluation of process change
projects. Such integration is valuable not only to
offer full support for process engineering, but
especially to ensure that patterns do not become
static documents but evolve to living documents
that continuously improve and evolve based on
experience and lessons learned.
In this chapter we explore the use of design
patterns in collaboration process design; to cre-
ate reusable sequences of activities that can be
deployed in organizations to change collaborative
work practices. For this purpose we will derive
requirements for a ComputerAided Process Engi-
neering tool that is offered as a design interface to
a pattern language. The tool will offer support for
the documentation of design patterns, their selec-
tion and combination into a sequence of activities,
their implementation in a process design and their
deployment in the organization. Further the tool
will support learning from use and deployment
of patterns to support continuous improvement of
design patterns. We will derive our requirements
based on the example of Collaboration Engineer-
ing, an approach to the design and deployment of
repeatable collaboration processes. The challenges
in Collaboration Engineering will pose several ad-
ditional requirements to the resulting collaboration
process design, and thus to the CAPE tool.
The remainder of this chapter is structured
as follows. The next section describes a generic
background on process design and deployment.
Based on this foundation, the third section de-
scribes relevant aspects of the Collaboration