TelCoW: telework under the co-ordination of a workflow management system

Telework is considered as an innovative work organization form for new dece ntralized structures. The flexibility of telework in both time and location of task execution must make it possible to take advantage of this work org anization for company competitiveness. Today, telework is mainly used for i solated tasks and for those with only few cross-references to others. But t elework will only achieve its full potential if attention is given to the f act that work in companies is normally co-operative work. For this co-opera tive 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 mod els 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 functi onality for this purpose. In this paper, we will define a specific business process model which is oriented for the modeling of decentralized structur es especially for telework and the direct support by a workflow management system (WFMS). Compared to traditional WFMSs, our system is extended by a m odule for the planning and monitoring functionality required for monitoring of teleworkers and their time management. The distribution of work is supp orted by means of a co-ordinator as a constituent part of the WFMS. It exec utes 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 telemat ics. The system is built using Internet technology and uses platform-indepe ndent WWW software for the user interface. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. A ll rights reserved.