TelCoW: telework under the co-ordination of a workflow management system
Telework is considered as an innovative work organization form for new decentralized structures. The flexibility of telework in both time and location of task execution must make it possible to take advantage of this work organization for company competitiveness. Today, telework is mainly used for isolated tasks and for those with only few cross-references to others. But telework will only achieve its full potential if attention is given to the fact that work in companies is normally co-operative work. For this co-operative work, business process modeling and workflow management is accepted as a supporting methodology. On the one hand this is important for enabling a production company to distribute work to employees who operate within this organizational model, and at the same time, compared with conventional models of organizing work, to increase the productivity of task execution. The increasing effort for co-ordination and monitoring is seen to be the main obstacle of co-operative telework. The use of existing workflow management systems for the support of co-operative telework is currently not possible; there is no tool available with specific co-ordination and planning functionality for this purpose. In this paper, we will define a specific business process model which is oriented for the modeling of decentralized structures especially for telework and the direct support by a workflow management system (WFMS). Compared to traditional WFMSs, our system is extended by a module for the planning and monitoring functionality required for monitoring of teleworkers and their time management. The distribution of work is supported by means of a co-ordinator as a constituent part of the WFMS. It executes workflows which are provided by a certain method for modeling business processes. This method already considers necessary refinements in passing over business processes to workflows. The models for business processes are supplied by means of a meta-model, which is extended by aspects of telematics. The system is built using Internet technology and uses platform-independent WWW software for the user interface.
telework co-ordinator workflow management intranet