Managing collaborative business process in knowledge-intensive environment

Business processes, especially those in knowledge intensive environments, often emerge rather than following predefined steps. Supporting emergent processes is one of the key issues for collaborative knowledge sharing. This paper first introduces a component-based workspace metamodel used to support emergent processes. A loosely-coupled collaborative process management model, WorkPath, is proposed based on the workspace structure to support flexible process evolution management and coordination among processes. Key elements that construct workspace and WorkPath, such as role, action, artifact, workspace and reference relation, are described in detail. An implementation prototype and future work is also discussed at the end of the paper.