Supporting knowledge work by speech-act based templates for micro processes

Abstract

Speech acts have been proposed to improve the design of interactive systems for decades. Nevertheless, they have not yet made their way to common practice in software engineering or even process modeling. Various types of workflow management systems have been successful to support or even automate mostly predictable schema based process patterns without the explicit use of speech acts as design primitives. Yet, todays work is increasingly characterized by unpredictable collaborative processes, called knowledge work. Some types of knowledge work are supported by case management tools which typically provide regulated access to case-related information. But communicative acts are not supported sufficiently. Since knowledge workers are well aware of the pragmatic dimension of their communicative acts, we believe that bringing this awareness of the nature of a speech act to a case management tool will allow for better support of unregulated knowledge intensive processes. In this paper we propose a speech-act-based approach to improve the effectivity of knowledge work. We thereby enhance case management systems by making them aware of speech acts. Speech act related micro processes can then be used to prevent misunderstandings, increase process transparency and make useful inferences.