Process-oriented information logistics: aligning process information with business processes

During the last decade, research in the field of business process management (BPM) has focused on the design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization of business processes. What has been neglected, however, is the provision of knowledge workers and decision makers with needed information when performing knowledge-intensive business processes such as product engineering, customer support, or strategic management. Today, knowledge workers and decision makers are confronted with a massive load of data, making it difficult for them to discover the information relevant for performing their tasks. Particularly challenging in this context is the alignment of process-related information (process information for short), such as e-mails, office files, forms, checklists, guidelines, and best practices, with business processes and their tasks. In practice, process information is not only stored in large, distributed and heterogeneous sources, but usually managed separately from business processes. For example, shared drives, databases, enterprise portals, and enterprise information systems are used to store process information. In turn, business processes are managed using advanced process management technology. As a consequence, process information and business processes often need to be manually linked; i.e., process information is hard-wired to business processes, e.g., in enterprise portals associating specific process information with process tasks. This approach often fails due to high maintenance efforts and missing support for the individual demands of knowledge workers and decision makers. In response to this problem, this thesis introduces process-oriented information logistics (POIL) as new paradigm for delivering the right process information, in the right format and quality, at the right place and the right point in time, to the right people. In particular, POIL allows for the process-oriented, context-aware (i.e., personalized) delivery of process information to process participants. The goal is to no longer manually hard-wire process information to business processes, but to automatically identify and deliver relevant process information to knowledge workers and decision makers. The core component of POIL is a semantic information network (SIN), which comprises homogeneous information objects (e.g., e-mails, office files, guidelines), process objects (e.g., tasks, events, roles), and relationships between them. In particular, a SIN allows discovering objects linked with each other in different ways, e.g., objects addressing the same topic or needed when performing a particular process task. The SIN not only enables an integrated formal representation of process information and business processes, but also allows determining the relevance of process information for a given work context based on novel techniques and algorithms. Note that this becomes crucial in order to achieve the aforementioned overall goal of this thesis.