Pervasive enablement of business processes

Abstract

People are an important part of many business processes. Current workflow-based implementations of business processes constrain users to the desktop environment; require them to periodically check for pending tasks; and do not support direct or synchronous people-to-people interaction. On the other hand, the wide spectrum of people collaboration tools ranging from telephones to instant messaging and to email have no provision for structured collaboration and are separate from business processes. We have designed and implemented a system, dubbed PerCollab, that integrates workflow and collaboration technologies. It allows people to participate in business processes from anywhere using a traditional collaboration mechanism. It proactively engages users in business processes by pushing interaction to a convenient device of the users. PerCollab uses an extended BPEL to formally define business processes with human partners and exploits dynamic user context to solve the personal mobility problem. Our prototype implementation integrates a variety of collaboration tools: instant messaging, email and e-meeting.