Flexible Support for Business Processes: Extending Cooperative Hypermedia with Process Support

In this paper, we present a cooperative hypermedia based process support system focusing on flexible business processes. An analysis of the communication, coordination and cooperation requirements of business processes reveals a gap in current computer support. We propose to address these requirements by extending a cooperative hypermedia system with process support. The resulting system, called CHIPS, uses hypermedia based activity spaces to model the structural, relational, and computational semantics of both individual tasks and processes. Application examples demonstrate that the CHIPS system retains the intuitive usability of hypertext and can support a wide range of business processes. Keywords Hypermedia, cooperative work, activity space, flexible workflow INTRODUCTION Business processes have been a focus for the development of computer support for a long time. Over the past few years, more emphasis has been placed on the inherent collaborative nature of business processes c..