Business activity patterns: a new model for collaborative business applications.

INTRODUCTION

This paper is a companion to "Activity management as a Web service," which also appears in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal. (1)

Accomplishing complex work in businesses requires a great deal of coordination between people and careful management of the numerous disparate resources that are necessary for the successful completion of the work. The Unified Activity Management (UAM (2)) project at IBM Research is investigating the "activity model" as a new approach to work coordination and management by presenting all of the work's resources in a single unified context. (3) In the following, we present the basic concepts behind activities and activity-centered computing and explain why this new approach has the potential for creating business value and increasing productivity.

Definitions

A business activity consists of regular collaborative work among participants to achieve a business objective. An activity structure (or "activity") is a digital schema-based representation that describes the properties of a business activity (such as organizing a conference) and that semantically relates it to the people, artifacts, tools, and events involved in carrying out the business activity. There are also relationships between interacting activity structures (such as subactivities or dependent activities). An activity pattern (or activity template) is an activity structure that is suitable for reuse by creating instances to guide the work. Activity-centered computing brings together the disparate computing systems and tools that are used to perform and manage work by creating linkages among activity structures and their associated resources. Activity management is the use of an activity-centered computing system to manage all the digital elements of collaborative business work.

Using activities in this sense constitutes a new model for managing digital work. The activity model has the potential to create a paradigm shift in how work is represented within computer systems. While existing tools (such as word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, instant messaging, workflow, and business processes) will continue to be used, the new model will enable users to see and manipulate work from any tool. Activity-centered computing tools present the entirety of the work as a single first-class activity object. This will change how users communicate, coordinate, and collaborate on work and will create new value for businesses as the new tools increase productivity through better organization and sharing of work.

Motivation

Activity-centered computing provides three key services for businesses. First, activities bring together in one system everything needed to support the achievement of business objectives. Content, data sources, processes and tools, and people and roles from existing systems are presented as a single shared context. Second, activity templates or patterns provide guidance by presenting a best practices checklist of the necessary people and roles, the steps to be taken, and the resources such as tools, templates, and learning objects to perform the work. Third, activities provide a record of the emergent communication, coordination, and collaboration that contribute to the completion of the work. This record facilitates the monitoring of an activity's progress, modifying an activity "on the fly," evaluating an activity's effectiveness, and creating new activities. The record of the activity as an activity structure is also an important source for the future reuse of work and plans, including informal processes that emerged during the work. These services are elaborated in the section "Activity services and infrastructure."

Related work

Our work in activity-centered computing can be understood in the context of a variety of research and technology--hypertext and the World Wide Web, communication tools, work process systems, and recent activity-based research.

Hypertext and the World Wide Web

Activity-centric computing has roots in the vision of collaborative intelligence starting with Englebart's "augmented human intellect," as embodied by his famous demonstration of NLS (on-Line System) in 1968. (4) NLS was one of the early examples of hypertext, but NLS was a collaboration support system, whereas hypertext research focused on creating rich linkages between documents (as in the work of Egan et al., (5) McCracken et al., (6) and Halasz et al. (7)). The World Wide Web made a simplified version of hypertext practical and ubiquitous. The Web is as much about linkages as about content, but the linkages are between information in documents. UAM adds to this explicit activity objects around which links are created to resources by means of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). There are currently efforts to add meaning to the unlabeled links of the Web, under the banner of the "semantic web". (8) The semantic web is based on representation technologies, such as RDF (Resource Description Framework), (9) in which semantic ontologies are expressed. UAM is building on these technologies to define an explicit ontology for activities. (1,10)

Communication tools

Most business work is supported by communications tools, such as e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, and so forth. E-mail is said to be the "habitat" (11) in which most people do online work. In the last few years, there has been renewed attention to research in e-mail and its problems as a work support tool. (12,13) Much e-mail research is investigating how to add task management to e-mail clients by such devices as threading, grouping, and tracking. The notion of "thrasks" of Bellotti et al. (14) is a good example of this approach (a thrask is a collection of message file threads, links, and document drafts which make up an interdependent task). UAM takes a broader approach, seeing e-mail as just one of the resources that need to be integrated with activity structures. Beyond e-mail, the Activity Explorer (described elsewhere in this issue (15)), is a communication-based approach to activity management, where the communications are posted to shared activity objects rather than directly between individuals. The Coordinator (16) is the most famous system based on the language-action perspective, which views work as communication acts, based on speech-act theory. (17) The theory defines the structure underlying the communications which coordinate the work. Like other formal systems, the Coordinator was criticized for stifling communication by its simplistic view of language use. (18) The UAM approach defines the activity structure at a higher level than communication, and thus does not restrict communication.

Work process systems

Business processes are usually supported by formal workflow systems. These systems are based on a programmatic representation of work, such as that enabled by the Business Process Execution Language. Workflow systems run processes automatically and direct tasks to people in order to involve them in the processes. Workflow systems have been criticized for the strict and rigid requirements they impose on people. (19,20) There is some research that tries to "soften" workflows by making them more adaptive. (21) However, there is evidence that most business work is inherently different from a workflow. People engage in "artful" processes, as argued in the paper by Hill et al. (22) in this issue. The UAM project studied a number of responses to RFPs (requests for proposals) in both IBM and other corporations. (23) The studies show that there is a fairly consistent structure to the work across a number of industries and businesses, though the work practice details "artfully" vary according to industry, enterprise, and specific situations. Other UAM studies reveal a structural consistency in the roles people play in a variety of office activities. (24) The UAM approach represents work as an activity pattern, which is an initial checklist of activities and subactivities and their associated people and resources. The activity pattern has no control structure; the checklist in each case is totally under the control of the people carrying out the activity.

Activity-based research

In the last few years, there have been empirical research investigations of work practices from the perspective of activity theory. (25) Recently, there have been research efforts to provide computer support of users' activities. (26) These systems capture the sequence of user actions on computational artifacts and help the user by organizing actions into clusters of activities. Examples of this approach include UMEA (User-Monitoring Environment for Activities (27)), TaskTracer, (28) and Activity-Based Computing. (29) The UAM approach is different in two ways. First, UAM does not attempt to automatically create activity structures, but rather requires them to be created either from patterns or by the users themselves. (30) Second, these systems all support individual work, whereas UAM is focused on collaborative work.

ACTIVITY SERVICES AND INFRASTRUCTURE

In this section, we describe in detail some of the services which the use of activities can provide and the infrastructural elements which support these services.

Services

As mentioned previously, three of the main services that activities provide are those related to context setting, informal process guidance, and the recording and reuse of work products. These services are explained in depth in the following subsections.

Context setting