Collaboration as a Reusable Component in Business Process Management

This paper presents an approach to incorporating collaboration among process actors as a major construct for business process modeling. Furthermore collaboration is realized as a reusable software component. This provides today´s workflow management systems with an opportunity to integrate collaboration with their existing process execution to realize full co-operation support for business process management. A collaboration-centric application framework based on a reusable collaboration component and a multi-agent platform is proposed. A description of how it was refined through use in a succession of applications used to trial team-working with various groups of mobile workers is included to show the usefulness and maturity of the approach. Finally some information is given in regards to the productisation of the enterprise mobilization platform of which the collaboration-centric application framework is a component.