Context-Aware Interaction Models in Cross-Organizational Processes

Rigidly pre-planned business processes are applied in the field of production planning and product development to coordinate the collaboration of single enterprises. Each step in these workflows is precisely scheduled, accounting for external constraints such as availability of material, delivery dates, and efficiency of humans and machines. However, finally all these steps are performed, or at least controlled, by humans and it is likely that in human-operated environments failures happen, and misunderstandings require adaptations and adhoc interference to avoid delays in workflow executions. In this paper, we discuss the role of human interaction support in traditional process-oriented environments, and present new approaches to dynamic involvement and interactions with collaboration partners. We highlight a typical use case where human experts are flexibly involved in certain steps of workflows that assist single tasks owners to solve emerging problems. In our approach, experts are discovered based on dynamically changing contextual constraints, such as problem areas and required expertise, and enable their fast involvement by using Web 2.0 communication facilities.