What right do you have to do that?-infusing adaptive workflow technology with knowledge about the organisational and autority context of a task (original) (raw)

To achieve more widespread application, workflow systems need to be developed to operate in dynamic environments where they are expected to ensure that users are supported in performing flexible and creative tasks while maintaining organisational norms. We argue that in order to cope with these demands, the systems must be provided with knowledge about the organisational structure and authority context of tasks. We support this argument by identifying a number of decision points that an adaptive workflow system must support, discussing how these decisions can be supported with technically oriented capability specifications, and describe how this support can be enhanced with the inclusion of knowledge about organisational structure and authority. We outline how such knowledge can be captured, structured, and represented in a workflow system. We then demonstrate the use of such knowledge by describing how the task initiation, task planning, activity scheduling, and agent interaction functions within a workflow system can be enhanced by it.