Collaboration for human-centric eGovernment workflows

The execution of cross-domain eGovernment processes is a challenging topic. In earlier work, we presented an approach based on collaborative workflows to support eGovernment interoperability. However, such collaborative workflows often appear to be lacking transparency and control supporting concepts and mechanisms. These are needed as eGovernment workflows appear to be heavily human-centric. What is in many cases described as collaboration appears to be a mere coordination and synchronization of processes, often ignoring human-centric interactions. One type of transparency and control supporting mechanism in human-centric collaboration is that of task delegation. In this paper we aim to analyse the gap between coordination and collaboration in the context of workflow management for eGovernment. First, we present a real case study to identify the key distinguishing factors regarding collaboration as opposed to coordination. Based on this, we present our approach to support cross-organisational collaboration. In particular, we will focus on the concept of delegation in the context of heavily human-centric collaborative workflows. Finally, we propose a delegation extension and structured set of future requirements regarding a coordination architecture presented in earlier work.