Systems and methods providing flexible representations of work

Abstract

Workflow techniques for coordinating organizational processes by providing flexible representations of work using generalized process structure grammars (GPSG). The techniques take into account that, in reality, work evolves both horizontally, in the co-operation of causally unrelated, but information-sharing tasks, and vertically, in the co-ordination of causally-dependent activities. Process modeling involves (1) viewing documents and tasks as duals of each other, capturing horizontal co-operation; and (2) exploiting constraints to express the soft dependencies among related activities and documents within the framework of generative rule-based grammars for processes, thus handling vertical co-ordination. This alleviates or avoids rigidity arising in conventional workflow solutions in part from viewing work processes as unfolding along a single line of temporally chained activities.