Three years ago, I gave a presentation entitled “Web 2.0 and BPM” at the BPMG conference in London, in which I said that the future of BPM and Web 2.0 (or what we would now call social software) will include tagging of process instances. Today, I saw some research that includes exactly that functionality, as part of a presentation on AGILIPO, an environment based on Agile principles to provide collaborative process modeling and execution. I missed the presenter’s name, and with six authors on the associated paper, I’m not going to take a guess. Update: the presenter was David Martinho of the Center for Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon.
This was a very fast-paced presentation with an Ignite-like pacing, so it was difficult to take notes, but there was some great material here. It really is looking at an Agile approach, with “short feedback cycles to steer instead of align” to avoid long modeling phases and allow unexpected behavior to occur.
One interesting bit is on allowing a user to create generic (non-specific) activities: what we’re starting to see in the commercial market as dynamic BPM, but simplified by allowing the inclusion of generic activities that can then be tagged with their specific details. The user adding the activity will assign tags specific to this process instance to associate semantics to the dynamically-added generic activity; the new process steps can be added back to the main process design through versioning.
Both comments and tags are allowed at the process instance level, as well as on the step in the process model.
Interesting ideas; I look forward to seeing how the concepts of process instance tagging are used in other applications.
Do you have a link on AGILIPO?
It’s difficult to find anything but your blog and the conference program.
You can find the article here https://fenix.ist.utl.pt/homepage/ist12628/research/organizational-design-and-engineering