pax

The information managers receive today about their business activities, most of which have a financial or historical nature, is no longer sufficient for the effective management of their companies. They require information which allows them to quantify and measure the fulfillment of qualitative goals within their organization, such as customer satisfaction, responsiveness, flexibility or quality. Furthermore, the information they receive needs to identify the impact of changes within the business process on the financial results (e.g. revenue, production cost, etc) of the past - but more importantly - the impact these changes have in the future. To fulfill these business requirements, a "Logbook of the collaborative production" is proposed. The logbook logs the cause-effect-chains along the business processes and needs to be seen as an extension to a Workflow Management System (WFMS). Instead of logging only the state-transitions of business process objects (WFMS-focus), the logbook records the state-transitions of all business objects (customer, product, offer, order, etc) that are transformed by a business process. By assigning these state-transitions along the business process, cause-effect-chains in business can be explained. The required information needs to be structured in such a way that it can be immediately used to perform or fulfill a given task. Because WFMS can produce metadata on the context of an act in the business process, business information can be captured and delivered automatically in that context. E.g. the user of the information system does not need to enter a search query, because the WFMS can automatically derive the query from the context-attributes of the workflow-step. Moreover, the user does not need to store the documents manually in the right context, because the WFMS knows the context and can automatically save the document in the context of the user's act. The "Logbook of the collaborative production" is used to log the collaborative acts and the triggered transformations of the business objects. A state-transition of a business object is physically represented by a set of data generations and modifications that are fired by a workflow-act-event. This work tries to demonstrate - from a business point of view - how the correlations between a workflow step (activity) and the resulting state transformation of the given business object can be captured in the logbook. In this case, the state transformation will include a specific set of new and updated information (data), which is a consequence of the taken workflow step. To fulfill the requirements of a given business, the "Logbook of the collaborative production" is applied in combination with a Collaboration Workflow Management System that uses a generic speech-act model to specify collaborative acts in a process. The reason being is, that the data logged and captured within a Collaboration Workflow Management System is more expressive than the one recorded by a "traditional" Workflow Management System, which in most cases can only provide information about "who has when forwarded what to whom". This work discusses the issues of a business-act- and cause-effect-chain-focused information supply. The investigations consider these issues from a business, information system-modeling and technical perspective.

Information Supply Chain: Handlungs- und ursachenbezogene I...

Information Supply Chain: Handlungs- und ursachenbezogene Informationsversorgung durch Collaboration Workflow-Unterstützung

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