Caramba—A Process-Aware Collaboration System Supporting Ad hoc and Collaborative Processes in Virtual Teams

  • Authors:

  • Schahram Dustdar

  • Affiliations:

  • Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology. dustdar@infosys.tuwien.ac.at

  • Venue:
  • Distributed and Parallel Databases
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Organizations increasingly define many business processes as projects executed by “virtual (project) teams”, where team members from within an organization cooperate with “outside” experts. Virtual teams require and enable people to collaborate across geographical distance and professional (organizational) boundaries and have a somewhat stable team configuration with roles and responsibilities assigned to team members. Different people, coming from different organizations will have their own preferences and experiences and cannot be expected to undergo a long learning cycle before participating in team activities. Thus, efficient communication, coordination, and process-aware collaboration remain a fundamental challenge. In this paper we discuss the current shortcomings of approaches in the light of virtual teamwork (mainly Workflow, Groupware, and Project Management) based on models and underlying metaphors. Furthermore, we present a novel approach for virtual teamwork by tightly integrating all associations between processes, artifacts, and resources. In this paper we analyze (a) the relevant criteria for process-aware collaboration system metaphors, (b) coordination models and constructs for organizational structures of virtual teams as well as for ad hoc and collaborative processes composed out of tasks, and (c) architectural considerations as well as design and implementation issues for an integrated process-aware collaboration system for virtual teams on the Internet.