Process Enactment: A Foundation for Managing Knowledge Intensive Work Processes

Attempts to extend process management to support dynamic, knowledge intensive activities have not been as successful as workflow for routine business processes. In part this is due to the dynamic nature of knowledge-intensive work: the tasks performed change continuously in response to the knowledge developed by those tasks. Also, knowledge work involves significant informal communications, which are difficult to capture. We propose an approach to supporting knowledge-intensive processes that embraces these difficulties; rather than attempting to capture every nuance of individual activities, we seek to facilitate communication and coordination among knowledge workers to disseminate knowledge and process expertise throughout the organization. 1 Problem, Goals, and Transition Problem Management Issue: Hidden Workflow Research Area: Learning Workflow Rules. Goals Develop a process enactment architecture and deployment mechanism for Supporting the performance of knowledge-intensive work; Capturing essential facets of knowledge-intensive work processes; Facilitating knowledge transfer among members of an organization. Transition The result of this work will be an architecture and mechanisms for a system to achieve the above goals, as well as a proof-of-concept implementation that demonstrates how the system would work in practice. 2 Approach 2.