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Enabling End Users to Proactively Tailor Underspecified, Human-Centric Business Processes: “Programming by Example” of Weakly-Structured Process Models

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Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 19))

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Abstract

Enterprises face the challenge of managing underspecified, human-centric business processes which are executed in distributed teams in a rather informal, ad-hoc manner. This gave hibernating CSCW and ad-hoc workflow research a new push recently. However, there is still the need to clearly perceive end users as the actual drivers of business processes and to enable them to proactively tailor these processes according to their expertise and problem solving strategies. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a prototype for end-user development of weakly-structured process models through email-integrated task management. The presented CTM (Collaborative Task Manager) prototype uses “programming by example” to leverage user experience with standard email and task management applications and to extend user skills towards the definition of reusable process structures. By closely correlating to the actual user work practices and software environment, the tool provides a “gentle slope of complexity” for process tailoring by end users.

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Stoitsev, T., Scheidl, S., Flentge, F., Mühlhäuser, M. (2009). Enabling End Users to Proactively Tailor Underspecified, Human-Centric Business Processes: “Programming by Example” of Weakly-Structured Process Models. In: Filipe, J., Cordeiro, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2008. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 19. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00670-8_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00670-8_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00669-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00670-8

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