Generalized process structure grammars GPSG for flexible representations of work

Abstract

The promise of workflow solutions for coordinating organizational processes is currently being obscured by strong criticism of the rigidity of their work representations. This rigidity arises in part from viewing work processes as unfolding along a single line of temporally chained activities. In reality, work evolves both horizontally, in the cooperation of causally unrelated, but information-sharing tasks, and vertically, in the coordination of causally-dependent activities. In this paper, we present our process modeling approach which (1) views documents and tasks as duals of each other, capturing horizontal cooperation and (2) exploits constraints to express the SOP dependencies among related activities and documents within the framework of generative rule-based grammars for processes. thus handling vertical coordination.