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A Workflow Architecture to Support Dynamic Change

tributed) and has to be flexible in relations to a turbulent environment (raising exceptions, errors and unexpected situations), process descriptions should be both 'malleable' and 'linkable' (in COMIC terms), meaning by that: temporarily and/or permanently modifiable according to the varying situations, and modular and compositional according to the dynamic nature of the working environment. In COMIC we are developing an architecture structured in three levels in order to design malleable and linkable Mechanisms of Interactions. Processes are very basic mechanisms of this type since they mediate and stipulate the articulation of distributed activities. Especially for not routinary processes, the history of the evolution of the process descriptions is an invaluable source of information for supporting both the correct understanding of the process and the learning about how to manage difficult situations. The problem of versioning well known in software development should be revisited in a more learning-oriented view, with probable benefits both in software engineering and collaborative process management. Another aspect affecting almost all activities of process management is the understanding of the impact of local modifications on the other parts of the distributed organization. Information technology can help in this activity by providing supports for simulation in the design phase and notification and information recording policies once the modification has taken place. In this view, modifications can be seen as one possible type of event triggering (semi)automatic reactive behaviours of the system supporting collaborative process management. Other meaningful events can be identified by considering the pervasive role of collaborative problem solving in the frame of process management. Problem solving show different facets, going from negotiation to argumentation through search for information and for people with the adequate skills. All of them contribute to the construction of the context in which the target process assumes its meaning. During the development of CHAOS, our attention was focused on the negotiation supported by explicit text communication between human beings. In this framework the Language/Action approach to communication pragmatics allowed us to identify communicative events relevant to the construction of three types of contexts: the operative context, concerned with the committed activities; the organisational one, concerned with the definition of roles and the distribution expertise; and finally, the context representing the distribution of knowledge about the processes of the work domain among the collaborating people. On the basis of the information contained in the above three contexts the system is able to provide supports reducing the organization opacity, in various ways. Obviously, this proposal is covering just partially the whole problematic of problem solving in collaborative process management. However, it shows that similar approaches can be followed to consider the missing facets, provided that adequate theoretical and/or empirical frameworks can be identified and suitably integrated, by taking into consideration the different communication modes and means. Another obvious aspect refers to the necessity of elaborating the information collected in this way in order to abstract from the aspects related to the contingency and make it valid in a general framework. We believe that the abstraction process can be performed just when the target process is quite well understood and becomes part of a consolidated collective behaviour. Moreover, the abstraction can be just the output of a human activity whose cost can be justified by its productivity: e.g., in presence of a high turn-over or of a fine grain distribution of relevant responsibilities among the collaborating people. Before that point is reached, the best support is a guided and adaptive access and navigation of the collected knowledge whose main value is just to be contcstualized in the situations in which the events triggering its collection have occurred. In conclusion, we believe that one of the main contribution of CSCW to process management is the emphasis on the nature of cooperation. In fact, very often supports to cooperation are understood in this framework as plain sharing of objects or of predefined processes, fully disregarding the aspects that in CSCW can be resumed under two basic keyword: negotiation and mutual awareness. A final remark on time: what we have presented is not specific to time critical (hard real-time) processes, since our research didn't cover these aspects in particular. We know about how time is represented in current languages for process descriptions: usually, it is attached as an information separated from the time-independent information. This approach can generate stone problems in the representation of processes even when they are performed by artificial actors where time (not necessarily absolute) is a constitutive feature. How these temporal problems are related to the management of time critical processes is an interesting subject of investigation.