INCORPORATING COLLABORATION IN BUSINESS
PROCESSES
How to Merge Business Processes and Collaboration Activities in an Efficient and
Agile Way
Stoian Boev, Elina Surova, Kaloyan Nikolov and Viktor Zhivkov
SimPro – Business Processes and Simulation Competence Centre, Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics
Sofia University and Interconsult Bulgaria, 7, Indzhe Voivoda Street, Sofia, Bulgaria
icb@icb.bg
Keywords: Business process, Business process model, Collaboration, Process execution, Automation, Task context,
Enterprise portal
Abstract: Nowadays, in order to remain competitive, organizations strive to be efficient and agile. They need well
defined and optimized business processes, without sacrificing the agility of collaboration. This can be
achieved by applying a new approach for combining and tuning these two into a single concept. To
implement the new approach characteristics of business processes such as task, goal, participating roles,
resources, etc. and the characteristics of collaboration like flexibility, informal communication,
collaborative tools, shared knowledge, the two should be merged together in a mixture called “task context”.
Intelligent collaboration business portal solutions that utilize the task context approach provide a unified
environment where users can collaborate while following the end-to-end process. Such solutions provide
agility while maintaining adequate levels of process control thus improving efficiency and effectiveness.
1 INTRODUCTION
The organizations’ need for agility and efficiency
improvement can be fulfilled through the use of
intelligent collaboration portal solutions, which
incorporate both the business processes of the
organization and the collaboration. These new portal
solutions introduce a novel approach for business
process automation. It allows retaining process
agility and covers the ad-hoc activities possible
within the organization. At the same time it allows
efficient performance of the daily tasks by providing
all needed information and tools at the right time.
2 WHY IS A NEW APPROACH
NEEDED
An agile and efficient work organization is a must if
companies strive to quickly adapt to an ever
changing external environment. Nowadays the
successful management and execution of the tasks
within the organization could be compared to jazz
improvisation which is a symbol of high creativity
(Scheer, 2007, p.2).
To be adaptive to change and at the same time
retain and improve its efficiency, an organization
needs an innovative approach for combining and
tuning its primary components:
Business processes - the actions which the
organization carries out;
Resources - people (the human component which
performs tasks), technological environment,
facilities, knowledge, etc.;
Collaboration and communication - working
together to achieve a goal.
2.1 Current State of the Organization
If an organization is examined today, the following
conclusions can be made:
Importance of business processes is realised:
“In the last 30 years companies have become more
business process aware” (Huberts and Petten, 2007,
p.3);
Business processes are described but not used:
122
Boev S., Surova E., Nikolov K. and Zhivkov V.
INCORPORATING COLLABORATION IN BUSINESS PROCESSESHow to Merge Business Processes and Collaboration Activities in an Efficient and Agile Way.
DOI: 10.5220/0004459301220128
In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2011), pages 122-128
ISBN: 978-989-8425-68-3
Copyright
c
2011 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
There are organizations in which the business
processes are in fact described but not used in the
actual carrying out of activities;
Business processes have been automated without
achieving the required effect:
The automation of the processes inside a single IT
system cannot be a sufficient solution. (Huberts and
Petten, 2007, p.3). Moreover the introduction of new
processes in this type of system can result in the
need for substantial additional investments for
software development (Scheer, 2004, p.8).
Another option is to integrate multiple information
systems to automate business processes. This
approach handles the communication between IT
systems and synchronization of the data, but it does
not support the communication and collaboration at
human level (Huberts and Petten, 2007, p.3).
Collaboration could be inefficient. In every
organization there are many communication and
collaboration channels. Collaboration tools are
powerful software products, but their uncoordinated
usage leads to a loss of efficiency and can lead to the
loss of valuable information.
The state of the organizations indicates that a new
approach for their setup is needed. That approach
should ensure the execution of processes in a
collaborative environment without limiting users.
2.2 Company Characteristics
In order to extract this approach, the organization’s
components, that are subject to automation have
been analyzed - namely processes and collaboration.
3 BUSINESS PROCESSES
The business processes are not only something that
organization does, they are the business of the
organization (Brabander and Davis, 2007, p.2).
“Business Processes are logically ordered sets of
activities that produce a result of value to the
customer” (Indulska, Kittel, and Muehlen, 2008,
p.3);
“The process defines what activities are
performed by who, when they are performed, and
how they are performed” (Crow, 2002);
Business processes are a set of tasks in a given
order. Each task has a trigger, executor, resources
required, input, output and an expected result.
The main business process characteristics are:
Predefined goal – each process has a goal that
should be achieved;
Set of activities – process contains a number of
tasks. They can be individual – performed by single
user or collaborative – a group of people working
together to achieve common goal;
Defined participants with their roles - the
participant can have different relation to the tasks
(e.g. execute, must be informed, etc);
Required resources for execution - to execute a
process certain resources are needed (data,
documents, knowledge, applications, time, etc)
Formal communication paths.
Processes can be classified as very rigid (production
processes), more flexible (sales) and ad-hoc (not
predefined process that can occur during the daily
work) (Brabander and Davis, 2007, p.2).
The processes are usually used as means for
analysis, optimization and control. During the daily
execution of processes the executors see and carry
out certain tasks without necessarily focusing on the
process as a whole. (Figure 1: Process and tasks)
Figure 1: Process and tasks.
The main issue when automating processes is
that described process models have some constrains:
Too rigid - the defined process models represent a
predefined set of activities in a given order. It is not
possible to describe all variants, because they are
even not known at that moment. The result is that
flexible and ad-hoc processes are unsupported. Thus
the direct automation and execution of the process
models leads to rigidity, omission of some possible
scenarios and cannot be used in a changing
environment.
Missing collaboration and real communication –
the defined process models represent the formal
communication. The possible additional actions and
collaborations that could occur and are part of the
process are not taken into consideration (i.e. while
carrying out a task the executor may need help from
a more qualified employee).
The question is how an organization can be flexible
and at the same time controlled. For achieving this
INCORPORATING COLLABORATION IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - How to Merge Business Processes and
Collaboration Activities in an Efficient and Agile Way
123
balance in the organization it has to be positioned on
the edge of chaos.
According to Scheer (2007):
Modern organizational theory pursues approaches
that take into account the dynamics within
companies and in markets, and that overcome
inflexible organizational principles.
Figure 2: alance Flexibility and Stability (Scheer, 2007).
Figure 2 shows an illustration of how
connectivity – which can also be interpreted as
communication and interaction – and the intensity of
control with an organization determine the
possibility for flexible, creative behavior (c.f.
Tomenendal, 2002, and Scholz, 2000). If the
organization has many rules, then all work processes
are set. If, at the same time, there is little
communication between the participants, then the
organization stagnates. It is unable to react quickly
to unexpected situations (lower-left section of Figure
2 Balance Flexibility and Stability). If, however, no
rules exist, chaos rules (top-right section of Figure 2
Balance Flexibility and Stability). The shaded area
represents a corridor of balance between minimal
constraint and maximum communication. Area II
describes a more stable organization that has not yet
stagnated, but does not demonstrate spontaneity and
flexibility as in the shaded area.
Having the business processes characteristics and
the business models constraints on one hand and the
theory of the edge of the chaos on the other the role
of business processes in their automation and
execution should be defined. Before that the
hierarchical structure of process models and their
tendency to change should be considered.
The structure of process models can be depicted
as a pyramid having high-level abstract processes on
top (see Figure 3 Current Structure of Business
Process Models). Going down processes get more
granular and volatile down to a point that requires
many details and loop-backs. The bottom zone is
where things get done.
As the base provides the added value of the
business process it is essential to ensure that it serves
the purpose flawlessly and strictly. This usually
means that business analysts try to define very rigid
control flow of the execution. Taking processes a
step further and trying to automate their execution it
becomes obvious that the base is not stable. There
are changes that occur frequently, but these changes
are minor viewed from higher levels.
Figure 3: Current Structure of Business Process Models.
The root cause of the problem is often business
processes models try to capture the collaboration
activities together with the control flow of the
process. This over-detailization induces instability.
To achieve stability and manageability it is
imperative to find a way to recognize individual
tasks and collaborative tasks and enable users to
convert individual tasks into collaborative if need
arises. Each such task will be defined as a small
perceivable brick in the foundation and will have
strongly defined boundaries both in time and
resources. The illustration will be changed from
Figure 3 Current Structure of Business Process
Models to Figure 4 Structure of Business Process
Models with defined collaboration task.
Figure 4: Structure of Business Process Models with
defined collaboration tasks.
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4 COLLABORATION
Collaboration is a process through which people
who see different aspects of a problem can
constructively explore their differences and search
for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision
of what is possible. Nowadays the collaboration is
one of the most success factors for the organizations.
4.1 Collaboration Types
Examining the collaboration within the organization
three types can be distinguished (see Figure 5
Collaboration types).
Figure 5: Collaboration types.
According to Callahan, Schenk, White (2008):
Team collaboration – there are clear goals to
achieve within explicit time-line. In such
collaboration group all members are known and they
have roles. Leadership increases the productivity of
the team collaboration.
Community collaboration – goals are more often
focused on learning rather than on tasks. Members
of a team contact another team in their community to
ask a question or take advice.
Network collaboration – it covers the collaboration
beyond the team and the community. There are no
explicit roles and time-lines.
The main collaboration characteristics are:
Flexibility – collaboration is used for almost each
problem area in the real life. The collaboration is in
the human nature and a various ways of
collaboration have been developed so far. There are
various collaboration tools for different situations.
Understanding – it is important to ensure that all
collaborators know what the goals are and all of
them can participate actively. For fruitful
collaboration a common language should be set.
No clear roles – how strict are the roles depend on
the collaboration type but in general in most cases
all collaboration members are treated equally. The
benefit is that the roles delusion encourages
creativity and the set back is that focus is easily lost.
That is why leadership is key for establishing good
collaboration.
No clear list of required participants – participants
should be invited based on the collaboration goals
and the knowledge of the problem domain that each
one can contribute.
Informal communication – the collaboration
should be organized in such way that all members
feel comfortable and can openly express their
opinion. At the same time the result of the
collaboration should be recorded and accessible for
each contributor at any given time. A variety of
technical tools could be used to support such
collaboration.
4.2 Different Way to Collaborate
There are different ways how to collaborate, but
most commonly they fall in two groups:
Information sharing and decision making;
Contribution to common knowledge or resources.
In addition collaboration channels can be various
(ordered by their “synchrony” – from synchronous
to asynchronous): Phone, Meeting, Instant
messaging, E-Mail, Forum, Wiki, File sharing.
People usually get accustomed to their preferred
channel of collaboration and rarely think if it is the
most appropriate one for the task at hand. This leads
to delays in collaboration and frustration. In order to
prevent such inconveniences there should be some
kind of aid that will present the right tool at the right
moment to the user. Most of the time this is done
using rigid business processes that confine the
collaboration activity to a predefined sequence of
tasks that should be done to produce the desired
output. Such decision makes matters even worse:
Business process analysts have a hard time
defining the process and all loopbacks typical to a
collaborative activity (e.g. brainstorming cannot be
described as a linear predictable sequence of
activities);
People who have understanding of how to
accomplish certain tasks get frustrated because they
have to follow new strange rules and they cannot
recognize easily the benefit of the “standardization”;
It is hard to follow procedures that describe
collaboration activities. Especially if business
analysts have “captured” all the details and subtleties
in the process.
INCORPORATING COLLABORATION IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - How to Merge Business Processes and
Collaboration Activities in an Efficient and Agile Way
125
Business processes models are not appropriate to
describe collaborative activities. Rather than
describing what to do it will be better just to define
certain boundaries and tools that will help them steer
in the right direction at maximum efficiency.
5 THE NEW APPROACH
Collaboration activities tend to lose efficiency as
they start to go off-topic or loop around themselves.
Thus a better boundary or constraints around the
problem domain is needed. Business processes can
lend several ideas how to set certain boundaries on
the collaboration. Taking the best from the business
processes and collaboration, a sensible mixture can
be compiled with the following characteristics:
Goal – a clear shared goal transmitted to all
participants;
List of participants – a way to include the
necessary involved people and people that have
knowledge to share or decision making power;
Allowed time period for the activity – work tends
to consume whole time dedicated to it according to
Parkinson’s Law. For activities such as collaboration
that is often the case. It is better to restrict the time
available than to have open-ended collaboration
sessions;
Resource availability – putting some constraints on
the resources at hand can make many decisions
easier and faster and will help focus on the real
goals;
Necessary information – only the relevant data and
information to the current task is shown;
Required knowledge – this includes the persistent
knowledge base of the organization (like procedures
and policies) and implicit knowledge from the
employee experience. The second one requires that
the experienced employee is invited as a participant
in the task.
Task execution tools – most of the time the task at
hand will require a tool to be used in order to
achieve the goal. Providing the right tool to people
will eliminate the time and effort lost in seeking the
tool and will minimize the risk of making a wrong
choice.
Collaboration tool/channel – standardization of
tools and channels for each kind of collaboration
activities within the organization brings the benefit
of reduced number of tool and IT systems. This way
organizations can reduce cost and clutter;
Activity history – keep track of what and when
happened prior to the current tasks so if there are
any notable changes with regards to the landscape
everyone is alert of them;
Dependencies – collaboration activities rarely exist
by themselves and affect no one and nothing. All
participants should be aware of the dependencies
between tasks in the process.
Figure 6: Task context.
Based on the set of characteristics a new concept
– task context, is introduced (see Figure 6 Task
context). Collaboration activity can be wrapped into
single task and attached to the proper task context
that includes the fore-mentioned properties. The gap
between business processes and collaboration
activities can be bridged with the following rules
how to integrate both:
Individual tasks inherently receive task context
from the business process. They are treated in the
same manner as they are. If someone needs to
collaborative support in such task the context easily
allows facilitation of such collaboration.
Collaboration activities are modelled as a single
task inside the business process without any
collaboration implementation details. The task is
given the necessary sufficient context.
Let’s take as an example the process Project
Management. At a certain moment during the
process the task Perform risk assessment should be
done. The task should have the following context:
Goal: assess relevant project risk;
Participants: project manager (Nikolay Nikolov),
risk officer (Ivan Ivanov);
Deadline: March 25
th
;
Necessary information: project scope, plan, client
information;
Required knowledge: risk assessment form and
methodology;
Execution tool: document management;
Collaboration tool: chat/phone;
Activity history: previous meeting minutes;
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Dependencies: task should be performed after
project plan and before kick-off meeting.
Note that there are no execution details, i.e. exact
steps how risk assessment should be done. Note also
that only information relevant to the project at hand
and to the specific task is present.
The only obstacle to implement this approach is
the lack of single orchestration tool that will drive
the business process to follow the model and will
provide task context to process and collaboration
activities. It will be a benefit if the tool is
collaboration enabled so it can host collaboration
channels.
6 ENTERPRISE PORTALS
Current collaboration tools focus primarily on
content management, specifically group editing and
reviewing of documents but lack integration with the
rest of the processes. On the other hand business
applications generally follow a rigid process and
collaborative tasks are done “outside” them. The
idea for the context and how it benefits from the
process and the collaborative approaches has been
introduced previously.
The context materialization is done by Enterprise
Portals or also known as Business Portals. The
concept behind portals is a Web site that serves a
single gateway to company information and
knowledge base for employees and possibly for
customers, partners, and the general public. Most of
the existing portals are missing one vital for process
and collaboration execution element – orchestration.
This can be solved by implementing Intelligent
Collaboration Business Portal (in short ICB Portal)
with the following main features:
Access/search - allows a user to get all the
information needed in the desired context. For
example, a loan officer does not need marketing
information to approve a loan. The portal shows the
loan officer only the information needed;
Categorization - the portal categorizes all
information so that it is delivered to the user within
the context needed;
Collaboration - single web portal spanning to
intranet or even internet allows individuals to
collaborate regardless of geographical location;
Business process execution – does the hard job to
orchestrate the whole process;
Personalization - The information provided to
individuals using a portal is personalized to that
person's role, preferences, and habits;
Expertise and profiling - Expertise and profiling is
essential for the collaboration element of a portal.
Individuals within an enterprise are profiled
according to their experience and competencies so
that project members can be chosen according to
their qualifications;
Application integration - This allows individuals to
deliver, access, and share information regardless of
applications used, provided IT systems are SOA
based and can provide parts of their functionality as
a service;
Security - This provides information to users based
on security clearance. The user authenticates and
accesses only information that has authorization for
based on company rules and policies.
An ICB Portal allows following structured business
processes, providing data to and from various
orchestrated applications, and enabling collaboration
whenever it is needed within the relevant task
context.
7 CONCLUSIONS
If organizations embrace this new approach and
implement the task context they will be able to
preserve the controllable process execution in a
collaborative environment enabling employees to be
productive and use company knowledge. This single
workspace will provide the executors knowledge,
information and tools needed at the right time for the
task execution. The concept of the task context can
be expanded further with the introduction of the
problem domain of project management. In this way
organizations can get maximized view on the
activities inside them and manage them better.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was partially supported by the
Bulgarian National Science Fund under Grant DO
02-75/2008.
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Collaboration Activities in an Efficient and Agile Way
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