ProcessBase: A hybrid process management platform

Abstract

Traditional structured process-support systems increasingly prove too rigid amidst today’s fast-paced and knowledge-intensive environments. Commonly described as “unstructured” or “semi-structured” processes, they cannot be pre-planned and likely to be dependent upon the interpretation of human-workers during process execution. On the other hand, there has been a plethora of Social and Web 2.0 services to support workers with enhanced collaboration, however these tools are often used ad-hoc with little or no customisable process support. In order to address these challenges, we thus present: “ProcessBase”, an innovative Hybrid-Processes platform that holistically combines structured, semistructured and unstructured activities. Our task-model proposed encapsulates a spectrum of process specificity, including: structured to ad-hoc Web-service tasks, automated rule-tasks, human-tasks as well as lifecycle state-tasks. In addition, our hybrid process-model enables the “evolution/ agility” from unstructured to increasingly structured process design; as well as the notion of “cases” representing repeatable process patterns and variations. We further propose an incremental process-knowledge acquisition technique for curation, which is thereby utilised to facilitate efficient “re-use” in the form of a context-driven recommendation system.