Objective
The objective of INSTRUMENTS is to investigate, design and develop a set of solutions to solve one of the key decisions that companies are facing today about their information systems support for their business processes and the usage and interaction among how to automate, in an optimum way, the cooperative process, that is, how to select and optimally use workflow systems, groupware environments and BPR decision support tools.
The problem is present in most medium and large companies. Market movements, such as the acquisition of Lotus by IBM or the Information Exchange by Microsoft, the market studies about workflow growing, the tendency to distributed systems, etc., have led to an uncertain position for many companies who wish to decide on their information systems for their future business processes. The solutions developed in the project will be focused in being used by the market, and they include:
- A methodology facilitating decisions concerning which information systems available in the market are optimum for the different aspects for the business process. It will facilitate decisions about when groupware tools or workflow systems should be used, constraints and factors to be taken into account, how to apply them, benefits expected, functionalities to be obtained, etc. The methodology will help to make decisions at the time of designing or reengineering the business processes, as a complementary means to facilitate natural evolution of the BPR process in later implementation.
- A set of tools that will facilitate the transfer from the model, optimized and simulated by BPR tools, to the model used by workflow systems. This is one of the key issues for the usage of BPR tools and the workflow and groupware systems. This will eventually lead to a more integrated approach and to a better and quicker progressing from the business process and organisation to the final computer system supporting it. These tools include the definition of an intermediate format, and facilities to go from BPR tools to the Intermediate format, and from this format to final Workflow models.
- Integration and interconnection facilities between Groupware and Workflow, to be able to interact on both kind of systems in the same process and then, being the natural support to the previously mentioned methodology.
The project will experiment with and use those technologies, at two users installations. Results and needs will be monitored and analysed to feed the development process of two interoperability tools: Groupware/workflow interoperability and BPR/workflow interoperability.
In order to arrive at the result, the consortium groups several of the most important actors, that we believe are necessary to carry out this work:
- Sema Group, one of the leading software houses in Europe (8,500 people for software development), and that has been the developer of methods such as Merise, SSADM and Euromethod, and particularly, Sema Group in Spain, that is specialised in cooperative projects, BPR and supply of supports, and that has been working for three years in developing workflow facilities on top of CORBA, grouped in the FORO product.
- Wang, a company of 6,000 people, whose main area is imaging systems and workflow, and that has been elected by Microsoft as developer of the workflow environments for the new systems, Windows NT and Windows '95.
- Norsk Regnesentral, a specialised centre that has been investigating human and technical factors of Groupware, to define facilities, tools and methods for cooperative support with different customers in real conditions.
- Two users, ANAYA Multimedia (a large publishing group) and NP (the post operator in Norway), with very clear constraints, that will experiment and validate the results of the project in order to ensure the approaches used.
This project is a very good opportunity to establish and increase the relations with the kernel of the cooperative work research between Europe and the USA, to be able to compete and even to be ahead, of what is today the top level in this area and, because of the importance, in the future computer systems. In our understanding, the commitment of exploiting results is another important added value of this project (World-wide in Wang, Europe-wide for Sema, large sectors of users involved).
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
28037 Madrid
Spain