Getting some perspective: using process descriptions to index document history

  • Authors:

  • Paul Dourish;Richard Bentley;Rachel Jones;Allan MacLean

  • Affiliations:

  • Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Xerox Research Center Europe, 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, UK;Xerox Research Center Europe, 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, UK;Xerox Research Center Europe, 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, UK

  • Venue:
  • GROUP '99 Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Process descriptions are used in workflow and related systems to describe the flow of work and organisational responsibility in business processes, and to aid in coordination. However, the division of a working process into a sequence of steps provides only a partial view of the work involved. In many cases, the performance of individual tasks in a larger process may depend on interpretations and understandings of how other aspects of the work were conducted.We present an example from an ethnographic investigation of one particular organisation, and introduce a mechanism, which we call “Perspectives,” for dealing with it. A “Perspective” uses the process description to provide an index into the history of a document moving through a process. Perspectives allow workflow systems to manage and present information about the execution of specific process instances within the general frame of abstract process descriptions.