Processpedia

Processpedia is a business process management software environment which fosters the collaboration among all stakeholders without disrupting the way they perform their work neither how they perceive it.

Current approaches to support stakeholders’ collaboration in the modelling of business processes envision an egalitarian environment where stakeholders interact in the same context, using the same languages and sharing the same perspectives on the business process. Therefore, such stakeholders have to collaborate in the context of process modelling using a language that some of them do not master, and have to integrate their various perspectives.

Processpedia, enhances collaborative modelling among stakeholders without enforcing egalitarianism. In Processpedia tacit knowledge is captured and standardised into the organisation’s business processes by fostering an ecological participation of all the stakeholders and capitalising on stakeholders’ distinctive characteristics.

On Going Work

• David Martinho is researching on how to capture end users tacit knowledge in a non-intrusive way and on how to foster the convergence of behavior among them, opt-how project.
• Paulo Pires is defining techniques for the synthesis of business processes on top of a folksonomy approach.

Publications

• David Martinho and António Rito Silva. A Recommendation Algorithm to Capture Endusers’ Tacit Knowledge. In 10th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2012). September 2012, Tallinn, Estonia. A. Barros, A. Gal, E. Kindler (Eds.): BPM 2012, LNCS 7481, 2012 pp. 216-222, 2012. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32885-5_17 (short paper)
• António Rito Silva and Michael Rosemann. Processpedia – An Ecological Environment for BPM Stakeholders Collaboration. In Business Process Management Journal. Emerald. Emerald. Vol. 18, Issue 1, February 2012. pp.20-42. DOI: 10.1108/14637151211214993
• David Martinho and António Rito Silva. Non-intrusive Capture of Business Processes Using Social Software: Capturing the End Users’ Tacit Knowledge. In The 4th Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2’11). August 2011, Clermont-Ferrand, France. F. Daniel et al. (Eds.): BPM 2011 Workshops, Part I, LNBIP 99, pp. 207-218, 2012. Springer.
• David Martinho and António Rito Silva. ECHO: An Evolutive Vocabulary for Collaborative BPM Discussions. In The Third Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software. September 2010, Hoboken New Jersey, USA. M. zur Muehlen and J. Su (Eds.): BPM 2010 Workshops, LNBIP 66, pp. 408–419, 2011. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20511-8_38
• António Rito Silva, Michael Rosemann and Samia Mazhar. Towards Processpedia: An Ecological Environment for BPM Stakeholders Collaboration. In The Third Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software. September 2010, Hoboken New Jersey, USA. M. zur Muehlen and J. Su (Eds.): BPM 2010 Workshops, LNBIP 66, pp. 449–460, 2011. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20511-8_41
• António Rito Silva, Rachid Meziani, Rodrigo Magalhães, David Martinho, Ademar Aguiar and Nuno Flores. AGILIPO: Embedding Social Software Features into Business Process Tools. In The Second Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software. BPM 2009 Workshops. LNBIP 43. Springer. pp. 219-230. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-12186-9_21

Thesis

• David Martinho. An Organizational Blackboard for Business Processes. MSc Thesis. Informatics and Computer Engineering - Technical University of Lisbon. October 2009.
• Sérgio Silva, Dynamic Chain Value: A Communities-based Case. MSc Thesis. Information Systems and Computer Engineering - University of Lisbon, November 2013.

Researchers

• António Rito Silva
• David Martinho (PhD on Knowledge Capture)

Past Researchers

• Sérgio Silva (MSc on Dynamic Product Chains)

Opt-how

Capturing the tacit knowledge owned by the organization workers is fundamental to identify the business process models inherent to the organization operations, and to be able to improve them. Within the fields of Business Process Management and Knowledge Engineering, there are approaches that focus on capturing that tacit knowledge: interviews, collaborative modeling meetings and collaborative knowledge dissemination environments such as wikis and blogs.

These knowledge capture approaches are considered intrusive to their participants in the sense that they are essentially not executing their usual daily work activities. Instead, end users are invited to participate on collaborative meetings or technological environments, contributing with their empirical knowledge by making use of notations (BPMN, EPC, Flowcharts, etc…) and concepts (process, activity, task, data object, event…) that are not usually present in their set of skills and competencies. By and large, the gap of languages, skills, competencies and concerns existing between the different type of business process stakeholders (end user, modeler, developer, etc…) can truly hinder a fruitful production of a business process model that is fit and aligned with the operational reality.

Assumptions

In order to focus the research of this work and to sustain a thesis, we need to define a set of assumptions:

Assumption 1 - An organizational structure is well-defined

The starting point of necessary knowledge to capture the organization’s business processes is its organizational structure, i.e. the organizational units, roles and responsibilities must be in place.

Assumption 2 - A working organization where employees are executing business processes

This work aims to capture the tacit knowledge concerning the organization business processes from the employees. Consequently, a real working organization with people executing business operations is assumed to exist.

Assumption 3 - Business processes are not automated

If one is to capture the tacit knowledge about the organization business processes, then, such business processes should not be already explicit and present in automation and their inherent models.

Assumption 4 - Business processes may be documented but not followed

The rational for this assumption is based on the situation where business processes may be documented, but these documentation does not represent the real workflow within the organization.

Assumption 5 - The organization cannot change

This work does not intend to tackle problems with process adaptability, but rather focus on the capture of the as-is. Therefore, this assumption is defined to ensure that the focus of this thesis is out of the scope of business process adaptation.

Assumption 6 - Workers interact using requests

To avoid being intrusive, this work respects the natural workflow interaction between co-workers: requests. This assumption is based on the fact that business workers do their daily activities by making requests to each other in order to achieve the final goal of the business process.

Expected Results

Some of the expected outcomes of this work consist on:

• Capture the organizational behavior.
• Identify and foster standard behavior by convergence.
• Allow divergent behavior whenever necessary.

Qualities

This work presents a solution where a set of qualities are ensured:

• Organizational workers continue on executing their daily tasks instead of participating in knowledge gathering and elicitation activities (interviews, collaborative sessions, etc…).
• A minimum level of intrusiveness is preserved.

###Thesis

The main thesis behind this research work is:

How to capture the tacit knowledge of the end users, business operational workers, and use it to foster the convergence of behavior within the organization, whereas minimizing intrusiveness?

Approach

This work is settled on the idea that knowledge workers know what needs to be done and the conditions required to do so, even if they do not know necessarily why it is done that way or to what end. Experienced business workers know what to do in a particular situation, or know how to adapt whenever new and unexpected situations appear. Even if knowing what needs to be done passes by asking another co-worker, that worker still owns the necessary knowledge to getting things done. Hence, even if there are no strict business process model supporting the workflow and addressing work to the correct resources, work can still be supported and behavioral practices can be captured and converged, enabling the efficiency of the workflow. However, in order to achieve that, a solution that preserves non-intrusive qualities during the capture of tacit knowledge of the operational worker is required.

After the solution is proposed, it should be deployed within a real case scenario and the community of individuals should be studied regarding the usefulness and fitness of the solution proposed, validating hypotheses and making the necessary changes to adapt the solution given the validation results. Hence, the validation of the solution proposed should be based on the study of the community of the proposed solution, and its emerging issues and requirements should be managed efficiently using an agile strategy.

Strategy

In order to follow the above approach, some goals need to be accounted for:

• Define a set of hypotheses on how to enable the capture of tacit knowledge and foster the converge of behavior while complying with the non-intrusiveness quality.
• Design a solution that is able to both support the business workers’ operations and capture that work in a semantic structure, considering the proposed hypotheses.
• Deploy the designed solution within a real organization to validate the initial set of proposed hypotheses.
• Validate and re-define the set of hypotheses accordingly to the results.
• Re-design the solution considering the new hypotheses.
• Re-deploy the re-designed solution.
• Re-validate the redefined set of hypotheses.
• Identify a set of guidelines and qualities that must be accounted for in order to support operational work efficiently by capturing and using the tacit knowledge of the business workers non-intrusively.

The goals listed above requires one to:

• Analyze the convergence and divergence of the existing behavioral trend lines among the business workers of the organization.
• Study the business worker’s acceptance and the usefulness of the solution proposed to accomplish their daily work activities.
• Measure the propensity of the business workers in behaving according to the converged behavior when executing situations that are considered divergent.