A Framework to Enhance Email based Business Processes

Despite the consensus that email is an important tool to handle a business process (BP), this prevailing tool poorly supports the tasks it needs to accomplish in a BP. A collection of interrelated business activities which solve a particular issue is commonly known as a BP. The performance of BP is vital for the growth and development of a business. The ineffective performance of BP is a major, yet avoidable, obstacle to the business productivity. Diverse technologies bear weight in enhancing the performance of BP. The technology involved in BP plays a dominant role in BP streamlining. Over the last decade, email has been embraced, not only by the organizations of every shape and form, but also by individuals as a very popular communication technology. The ubiquitous and simple nature of email makes it a suitable candidate to be used as a technology to support BP related communication. However, email poorly supports the task of handling BPes, due to its ad-hoc and heavily distributed nature. In addition, the primary messaging metaphor of most email clients is not optimized for the activities of a BP. But they only address the problem of managing the volume of email. Therefore this paper provides a solution to enhance the use of email for performing BP related activities efficiently and effectively, without changing email´s fundamental technical infrastructure. The proposed solution is expected to achieve its objectives by means of a cognitive approach reducing human intervention to the BP.