Using process support to achieve distribution

The most important aspect of process support is that it provides a mechanism by which the functional architecture of an organisations may be described. An organisation can be modelled as a collection of processes involving interacting agents, for example, a configuration management agent interacting with a release and control agent. These agents are modelled as `roles´ whereas meetings and other forms of inter-agent communication are described as `interactions´. The Process Support System can be used to describe these processes in terms of activities and groups of activities (roles) and co-ordination between roles (interactions). The PSS is only used to describe the organisational aspects, not computational detail-these are left to external roles representing computer based tools, applications, etc. The role-interaction model can be used to describe organisations that operate on more than one site using more than one type of computer system/application, the paper describes how PSS achieves this