Enhancing Experience Management and Process Learning with Moderated Discourses: The indiGo Approach

The business process models of organizations operating in the innovative software market are one of their major knowledge assets. However, these models need to be constantly evaluated and hardened in the business of those organizations and enhanced by further knowledge to make them operable. The approach of the project indiGo (Integrative Software Engineering using Discourse-Supporting Groupware) is to support this evaluation and enhancement offering members of an organization to engage in discourses about the process models and their execution (communities of practice) and by presenting process-related lessons learned fitting to the current project context. On the organizational level, finished discourses will be analyzed and summarized to improve process models (process learning) and create new lessons learned (learning from experience). To achieve these objectives, indiGo will develop an integrated, comprehensive set of methods and a technical infrastructure as a joint effort of two Fraunhofer Institutes: Fraunhofer IESE (Institute for Experimental Software Engineering) in Kaiserslautern and Fraunhofer AiS (Autonomous Intelligent Systems) in Sankt Augustin.