Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Tutorial on Crowdsourcing at ICSOC
I'm going to crowdsource Maja and my tutorial on Crowdsourcing at ICSOC.
Monday, December 6, 2010
COCOA 2010: Workday on Coordination, Collaboration and Ad-hoc processes
The COCOA 2010 event is now underway. Very good turnout, much richer than expected.
Ad-hoc and semi-structured business processes
This morning session is on ad-hoc and semi-structured business processes, with contributions from Accenture (Agata Opalach), IBM Research (Axel Martens and Dan Oppenheimer) and our own Hamid Motahari.
All of the presenters agree that the typical BPM-like description of work activities through workflow-like business processes is too rigid. Need to automate intelligently, and do not use BPM as the "dictator". Tools should adapt to what people do rather than the other way around. One more issue with the BPM-like approach is the fidelity of the model, and the problem of maintaining from going obsolete.
There is a trade-off between industrialization and flexibility, and probably we don't have a theory yet. How to get that trade-off right is a hard open problem.
Human interaction, coordination and ad-hoc activities
Second session of the morning saw contribution from Les Nelson, PARC, Daniela Busse, SAP labs, Alex Kass, Accenture and John Tang, Microsoft research.
Themes that emerged were the fact that processes are more and more cross-boundaries; the difference of synchronous vs. asynchronous collaboration (John presented an extended presence tool that is very much about synchro vs. Les' Mail2Tag system, that is mostly about asynchronous); information overload requiring collaborative filtering, and the tension between the top-down and bottom-up modes for regulating, or letting collaboration emerge.
Again, we need most help for things that are not planned in advance.
Lunch discussion feed
Few more presentations that we are using to feed our lunch discussion. Alex Birukou from University of Trento talked about collaboration in end-to-end publishing workflows. Dave Duggal of Consilience touched on innovative modeling techniques for processes, in the ideate collaboration framework. Florian Daniel, from the University of Trento talked about their wisdom-aware computing paradigm, aimed at helping with process design. Lav Varshney borrowed concepts from stochastic systems theory and adapted them to coordination.
Adaptive Case Management, Teamwork/Enterprise-wide Coordination and Collaboration
Fred Cummins, chair of the OMG task force on business management and integration gave an intro to case management and layed out some of the concepts and open challenges. Paul O'Neill from Singularity, gave the point of view on case management of the practitioner community, and drew clear differences between BPM and case management. Tara Matthews of IBM research Almaden drew attention on the importance of planning, designing and evaluating collaborations, and introduced extensions to the concept of collaboration personas as precise dsecritptions of hypotetical groups. Stan Rosenschein from Stanford presented a proposal for blending the best of both words between structured workflow and free-form collaboration.
An important point is that tools should provide assistance but not prescription, and it's important to define roles and create templates for flexible processes. This is the recipe for case management. Case management has been around for hundreds of years, but the term is picking up momentum now.
Tara noted that in CSCW, activity management is a very similar discipline to case management.
Final Discussion: Different perspectives (BPM,CSCW, NLP, etc) - Opportunities and Challenges
John Tang, Munindar Singh, Henk de Man from Cordys, Daniela Busse, Les Nelson and Christoph Bussler took part in the final discussion, representing the different communities of BPM, CSCW and adaptive case management. The discussion verted on different aspects of how much should processes been formalized versus how much flexibility should be allowed to users. It was felt that the discussion was a good vehicle for bringing the communities together even though the different point of view might be hard to reconcile. A list of challenges that we want to overcome will be the outcome of post-workshop discussions that we'll hold offline.
Ad-hoc and semi-structured business processes
This morning session is on ad-hoc and semi-structured business processes, with contributions from Accenture (Agata Opalach), IBM Research (Axel Martens and Dan Oppenheimer) and our own Hamid Motahari.
All of the presenters agree that the typical BPM-like description of work activities through workflow-like business processes is too rigid. Need to automate intelligently, and do not use BPM as the "dictator". Tools should adapt to what people do rather than the other way around. One more issue with the BPM-like approach is the fidelity of the model, and the problem of maintaining from going obsolete.
There is a trade-off between industrialization and flexibility, and probably we don't have a theory yet. How to get that trade-off right is a hard open problem.
Human interaction, coordination and ad-hoc activities
Second session of the morning saw contribution from Les Nelson, PARC, Daniela Busse, SAP labs, Alex Kass, Accenture and John Tang, Microsoft research.
Themes that emerged were the fact that processes are more and more cross-boundaries; the difference of synchronous vs. asynchronous collaboration (John presented an extended presence tool that is very much about synchro vs. Les' Mail2Tag system, that is mostly about asynchronous); information overload requiring collaborative filtering, and the tension between the top-down and bottom-up modes for regulating, or letting collaboration emerge.
Again, we need most help for things that are not planned in advance.
Lunch discussion feed
Few more presentations that we are using to feed our lunch discussion. Alex Birukou from University of Trento talked about collaboration in end-to-end publishing workflows. Dave Duggal of Consilience touched on innovative modeling techniques for processes, in the ideate collaboration framework. Florian Daniel, from the University of Trento talked about their wisdom-aware computing paradigm, aimed at helping with process design. Lav Varshney borrowed concepts from stochastic systems theory and adapted them to coordination.
Adaptive Case Management, Teamwork/Enterprise-wide Coordination and Collaboration
Fred Cummins, chair of the OMG task force on business management and integration gave an intro to case management and layed out some of the concepts and open challenges. Paul O'Neill from Singularity, gave the point of view on case management of the practitioner community, and drew clear differences between BPM and case management. Tara Matthews of IBM research Almaden drew attention on the importance of planning, designing and evaluating collaborations, and introduced extensions to the concept of collaboration personas as precise dsecritptions of hypotetical groups. Stan Rosenschein from Stanford presented a proposal for blending the best of both words between structured workflow and free-form collaboration.
An important point is that tools should provide assistance but not prescription, and it's important to define roles and create templates for flexible processes. This is the recipe for case management. Case management has been around for hundreds of years, but the term is picking up momentum now.
Tara noted that in CSCW, activity management is a very similar discipline to case management.
Final Discussion: Different perspectives (BPM,CSCW, NLP, etc) - Opportunities and Challenges
John Tang, Munindar Singh, Henk de Man from Cordys, Daniela Busse, Les Nelson and Christoph Bussler took part in the final discussion, representing the different communities of BPM, CSCW and adaptive case management. The discussion verted on different aspects of how much should processes been formalized versus how much flexibility should be allowed to users. It was felt that the discussion was a good vehicle for bringing the communities together even though the different point of view might be hard to reconcile. A list of challenges that we want to overcome will be the outcome of post-workshop discussions that we'll hold offline.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
