Perspectives for integrating knowledge and business processes through collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration is now playing a greater role in business processes, where knowledge workers leverage knowledge to develop innovative products and services. Such business processes go beyond the goal of simply achieving a well defined outcome at minimum cost using well defined tasks. They place more emphasis on collaboration and knowledge sharing and ways to change processes as collaboration evolves. The paper calls for greater emphasis on perspectives other than process flow in process design. These are knowledge, social structure, business activity, organization and technology. The paper describes process design ways to combine these perspectives into a holistic model and converting the model a collaborative infrastructure that allows users to align collaborative technologies to their collaboration. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.