AN ORGANIZATION MODEL TO SUPPORT DYNAMIC COOPERATIVE WORK AND WORKFLOW

The rapid growth of computer networks, along with the wide acceptance of the Internet and Intranet (Cole 2003; Whinston et al. 2001), has pushed distributed computing into a new era. Software developers who used to focus solely on atomic and isolated computational models are now expanding their scope to cover group-computing solutions as well. Numerous research efforts in collaborative computing and process management have resulted in workflow and other automation techniques. These attempts emphasize mainly theories regarding process modelling and concurrent activity coordination. However, applications of these technologies in a large production environment have faced major setbacks due to the disconnection between the conceptual process definition and the actual complex operations of the real operating environment. The principal problem is that organizational information is rarely, if ever, comprehensively modelled, let alone integrated, into the process management system. Indeed, without a flexible and extensible organization model to describe the global resource information, it is impossible for a rapidly changing company to apply a