Backtracking Office Procedures

Abstract

The office cooperation system ProMInanD supports cooperative office work by means of electronic circulation folders. Based on an abstract description of the office task and knowledge of the organizational structure a folder is navigated through the organization from one office worker in charge to the next. A substantial part of ProMInanD’s functionality is the handling of exceptional situations. The topic of this paper is a method by which an office task can be returned to a previous state under respectation of the system consistency, either to process it in a different way or to cancel it altogether. The solution is based on a compensation method and offers a roll back operation for a step, a step sequence, and a total cancelation of an office task. The realization of this backtracking method is discussed in the context of a single office task and in an office task family.