Towards a Standardized Task Management

Business processes are increasingly controlled by IT-systems automatically, but they still consist of many tasks that have to be performed by people. Despite an appropriate IT-infrastructure is required for Task Management, until now this is a neglected topic in the research domain. In general, existing concepts and products for Task Management are not sufficient and, even worse, inter-partner aspects are not supported at all. For the first time, this paper analyzes the requirements for Task Management in a comprehensive way. Furthermore, we present an architecture for a Task Management Infrastructure that allows to fulfill these requirements even in inter-partner scenarios. This architecture was developed in the TAMPRO project and is based on emerging standards as WS-HumanTask and BPEL4People, which are discussed as well.