Discovering role-relevant process-views for disseminating process knowledge

Abstract

Workflow technology supports the management of organizational process knowledge. However, workers (representing organizational roles) cannot easily obtain a global view of a complex and large workflow. This work proposes a process-view based dissemination of process knowledge to address this problem. A process-view is an abstracted process derived from a physical process, and can provide adaptable task granularity. The relationships among tasks, roles and operations, as specified in role-based access control systems, are used to evaluate the degrees of relevance between roles and tasks. Next, a novel algorithm is proposed to generate automatically role-relevant process-views based on degrees of relevance. Knowledge management systems can thus disseminate abstracted process knowledge through process-views for those roles in a complex workflow. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.