GMD German National Research Center for Information Technology Innovation through Research Jörg M. Haake Applying Collaborative Open Hypermedia Concepts to Extended Enterprise Engineering and Operation

Overview Extended Enterprises (EE) Requirements of Engineering and Operating an EE Related Work Applying a COHS-based Approach Conclusions

Extended Enterprises (EE) Dynamic Networked Organisation Extended Enterprise Resources partner organisations combine capabilities and business processes to perform a joint business process EE persists after individual project is finished

Requirements of EE Eng. and Op. Dynamic Networked Organisation Extended Enterprise Resources find partners (in EE, outside) define cooperation among partners execute cooperative activities coordinate activities joint business process: heterogeneous information items heterogeneous information systems

Requirements ctd. Joint business process  combines/integrates individual partners’ business processes  needs to be cooperatively defined and executed across organisational boundaries  needs to be adapted at run-time (emergent processes!) Some requirements:  Shared representation of joint work plan/work process, partners’ skills and capabilities, and overall organization  Collaborative access to and manipulation of the shared representation by all partners  Coordination support for executing the joint work process (including enactment of work processes, and adaptation to emergent needs);  Communication support facilitating cooperation among members of distributed teams;  Learning support, which facilitates learning of the work process as well as capturing of best practice examples and debriefing of work process execution.

Related Work WFMS non cooperative; references to work objects only Shared Workspace Systems (e.g. BSCW) focus on asynchronous work; no process support Shared Hypermedia Workspaces (e.g. HyperDisco, CAOS, Posties) focus on asynchronous work; no process support Cooperative Hypermedia Systems with Process Support (e.g. Kacmar et al., CHIPS) process and workspace management support, but not open/extensible Open Hypermedia Systems (e.g. EUROCODE, Manufaktur) open & collaborative workspaces, but no process support

Applying a COHS-based Approach  provide EE Model: use open hypermedia to represent descriptions of work processes, organizational descriptions (e.g. actors, roles, capabilities) and work objects (e.g. documents) as a nested hypermedia graph  provide a shared repository for the EE model and  enable cooperative access to the shared EE model by all participants via using collaborative open hypermedia concepts  provide open hypermedia clients as cooperative tools for browsing and manipulating the EE model stored in the repository  support enactment of work processes by providing a workflow structure service in the cooperative open hypermedia system (COHS).

Representing the EE Model EE Model is an emergent hyperstructure consisting of descriptions of work processes organizational descriptions (e.g. actors, roles, and capabilities) and work objects (e.g. documents) EE Model components reside in partners’ organisations are of heterogeneous nature Wrapper concept: represents an external information resource as a node attributes are used to define which tools can be used to manipulate the content object sub typing enables new types of information objects to be added at run-time EE Model (meta structure)

Shared EE Model Repository provides multi-use access to shared EE Model standard access interface asynchronous and synchronous access to its content provides common interchange format: XML defines common data model: XML DTD represents EE common types

Cooperative Tools clients in the COHS serve as tools for browsing and manipulating the EE model  native clients:  Cooperative content editors (e.g. for text, graphics, images),  Cooperative search tool for executing queries on the shared EE model,  Orientation tool for displaying hierarchical overviews on the nested EE model (including group awareness),  Process definition and enactment worktop, which provides an EE portal to the users (offering links to the shared EE model and to tools working on it, including tailoring support).  Integration of legacy tools:  document centric integration: tools are associated with the documents/resources they operate on (like MIME types) via wrapper types  process centric integration: explicit calls to the tools are stored as macro commands (e.g. persistent queries or persistent commands)

Cooperative Tools ctd. External tools integrated in the EXTERNAL EE engineering and operation environment:  SimVision simulation tool for probabilistic simulation of work processes,  METIS visual process modelling tool,  Workware work enactment environment.  Integration:  necessary data provided by the shared repository is specified and the target application is called.  Data is either translated from the repository into the target data format (in the case of the SimVision tool) from the COHS or  Data is extracted by the called tool (in case of METIS and Workware, which can deal with the native XML format).  Integration of non-cooperative tools via NetMeeting  COHS creates NetMeeting session with members and tool

Support for Process Execution EE model uses hypermedia types for representing work processes COHS Server provides process execution engine as a structure service to enact work process descriptions process browser provided COHS client users can at any time use the browser to modify the (so far not enacted) work process description changes immediately take effect for continued enactment. users can execute the tasks together (e.g. instead of working on a task alone) XCHIPS Process Browser

process browser provided as COHS client overview about structure and current status of the work process trigger execution of tasks browser displays the documents needed for tasks access to tools modification of work process description users can execute the tasks together XCHIPS Process Browser

Implementation EE models are stored in the COHS server using XML according to a hypermedia-based XML EE Model DTD Web Resources Access, CC, execution different cooperation modes notifications

Implementation ctd.

Conclusions COHS-based solution for supporting engineering and operation of an EE: representing EE models as extensible hypermedia graphs in XML collaboration structure service supporting for synchronous and asynchronous manipulation of EE models workflow structure service is provided, which coordinates work in the EE by enacting the EE model Benefits include maintaining both WF structure and work objects in a unified open hypermedia workspace: consistency, unified portal COHS wrappers and tool integration methods enable the integration of new tools and information resources: run-time extensibility supports native as well as legacy tools Problems include configuration of the firewalls coordination of concurrent access to shared repository data from non- native tools: locking limits concurrent work