This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology. A key insight of the framework presented here is that coordination can be seen as the process of managing dependencies among activities. Further progress, therefore, should be possible by characterizing different kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of processes are analyzed from this perspective, and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Processes analyzed include those for managing shared resources, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and tank/subtask dependencies. Section 3 summarizes ways of applying a coordination perspective in three different domains: (1) understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing cooperative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel computer systems. In the final section, elements of a research

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Modern distributed systems contain a large number of objects, and must be capable of evolving, without shutting down the complete system, to cater for changing requirements. There is a need for distributed, automated management agents whose behavior also has to dynamically change to reflect the evolution of the system being managed. Policies are a means of specifying and influencing management behavior within a distributed system, without coding the behavior into the manager agents. Our approach is aimed at specifying implementable policies, although policies may be initially specified at the organizational level (c.f. goals) and then refined to implementable actions. We are concerned with two types of policies. Authorization policies specify what activities a manager is permitted or forbidden to do to a set of target objects and are similar to security accesscontrol policies. Obligation policies specify what activities a manager must or must not do to a set of target objects and essen...

Enterprise roles define the duties and responsibilities of the individuals which are assigned to them. This paper introduces a framework for the management of large distributed systems which makes use of the concepts developed in role theory. Our concept of a role groups the specifications of management policies which define the rights and duties corresponding to that role. Individuals may then be assigned to or withdrawn from a role, to enable rapid and flexible organisational change, without altering the specification of the policies. We extend this role concept to include relationships as means of specifying required interactions, duties and rights between related roles. Organisations may contain large numbers of similar roles with multiple relationships between them, so there is a need for reuse of specifications. Role and relationship classes permit multiple instantiation and inheritance is used for incremental extension of the organisational structure with minimal specification e...

This paper hopes to make a contribution on three aspects of workflow systems: we stress the fact that there is a broken symetry between the level of the specification of the procedures and the level of their enactment; we propose some ways of classifying activities and exceptions; and we propose some run-time functionalities to help users deal with exceptions.

Roles have been widely used for modeling the authority, responsibility, functions and interactions associated with manager positions within organizations. In this paper we discuss the issues related to specifying roles for both human and automated managers of distributed computer systems. The starting point is that a role can be defined in terms of the authorization and obligation policies, for a particular manager position, which specify what actions the manager is permitted or is obliged to do on a set of target objects. This permits individuals to be assigned or removed from positions without respecifying the policies for the role. However these policies are insufficient for fully specifying relationships between managers and the targets they manage or between different manager roles. There is a need to specify the interaction protocols and how managers coordinate and synchronize their activities. The role based framework consists of a set of tools enabling the creation of roles ...

Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminology, and predefined plans. Knowledge work is not like that. Plans for knowledge intensive processes are elaborated and reinterpreted as the work progresses. Interactive process models are created and updated by the project participants to reflect evolving plans. The execution of such models is controlled by users and only partially automated. An interactive process system should - Enable modelling by end users, - Integrate support for ad-hoc and routine work, - Dynamically customise functionality and interfaces, and - Integrate learning and knowledge management in everyday work.

Active business process support utilizing workflow technology is promising for building information systems that are flexible regarding both business and corresponding IT infrastructure transformation. To achieve this, conceptual models of work processes have to be aligned with interests of several stakeholders, including business professionals and users. In particular, user access to process models presuppose comprehensible in addition to expressive models. We propose a framework for evaluating quality in process modeling languages (PMLs) and models. It is applied to a representative sample of flexible workflow products and prototypes. We study the properties of the various products ’ underlying PMLs, and derive their first cut ontology, or meta-model. In carrying out the evaluation, we show the applicability of our framework, and point out some research opportunities in areas where the products differ widely or carry similar deficiencies. 1.

One of the problems faced by an organisation participating in a virtual enterprise is how to specify internal and external aspects of the organisation in terms of the organisational roles involved and policies applicable to the roles. Another problem is how to manage such a virtual organisation and guarantee that its operations are in agreement with the specification. In this paper we present two role-based approaches that address these problems. The first approach is based on the RMODP framework and can be used to specify structure and interactions in a virtual enterprise. The second approach was initially aimed at managing large distributed systems, but can also be used to specify and implement roles and policies relating to a virtual enterprise. We analyse the relationships between these two approaches and illustrate how they can be applied by means of a simplified virtual hospital example.

The paper discusses the general purpose of analysis and evaluates OOA with respect to this, arguing that OOA does not deliver what it claims to do. The two major problems are that OOA often does not meet the full needs of the analysis phase, and that the transition to design is not always as easy as promised. The last point is illustrated by a solution to the OOPSLA conference registration problem. Due to the mentioned shortcomings, OOA/OOD was not found sufficient for forming the basis of a common development methodology for three Norwegian software producers in a technology transfer project with our university. The suggestion made is that OOA should become problem-oriented rather than target-oriented