Generating collaborative work processes

The paper describes ways to support collaboration in business processes. Collaborative processes are different from predefined processes in the sense that they can change dynamically as the situation emerges. Such changes can be time consuming as they require users to continually adapt the system to changing contexts. The solution proposed here to support process evolution is to provide generic work objects and use software agents to assist users to dynamically change the process by quickly adding or changing work objects. The paper outlines a way of describing work processes in terms of generic work objects. The structure of the generic work objects is based on a metamodel, which provides the fundamental concepts to define generic objects. A prototype implementation is then described.