Architecture and design of an internet‐enabled integrated workflow and groupware system

Schahram Dustdar, Michael zur Muehlen
2005 Business Process Management Journal  
In the last decade, bureaucratic organizational hierarchies increasingly have been replaced with flatter organizational forms, bringing together people from different disciplines to form virtual project teams within and between organizations. Distributed virtual teams often are self-configuring networks of mobile and "fixed" people, devices, and applications. The contribution of this paper is to present theoretical and practical foundations of an integrated Internet-enabled workflow and
more » ... e system. This is achieved by first discussing our contribution in context to related work (collaborative technology) and their underlying metaphors. We show that for an integrated workflow and groupware system, the metaphor used has to be considered and chosen carefully, since in an Internet context, most process participants are members of (many) virtual teams and business processes are often cross-organizational. Furthermore, we discuss design requirements for such an integrated system and provide one example systems implementation (Caramba), which we consider helpful in understanding how virtual teams use combined workflow and groupware systems on the Internet. Finally, we conclude this paper by discussing lessons learned and by providing an outlook on our future work.
doi:10.1108/14637150510600452 fatcat:qcnzklxy25bafg462ujjqsuxbq