Charles R. Hill

Beyond predictable workflows: enhancing productivity in artful business processes

Until now, the greatest productivity gains in business processes have been achieved by formalizing the processes into computer-managed workflows. However, many processes have not yielded to this approach, and in its stead, users have depended on ad hoc collaboration tools, such as e-mail and instant messaging, to coordinate their work. While undeniably useful, these tools are disconnected from process methods and can become overloaded and unproductive. Through use cases, we show that many business people are, of necessity, integrators of information technology (IT), but receive inadequate support from centralized IT. We maintain that productivity will be increased by better enabling users to select and integrate IT services as their needs evolve, promoting a shift that we call the democratization of process. With the organizing principles of activity-centric computing and the arrival of valuable online services and decentralized methods for integrating them into existing applications, such a shift is now becoming technically feasible-a goal that enterprises should pursue.

Activity explorer: activity-centric collaboration from research to product

Activity Explorer is the first product from IBM that supports the notion of activity-centric collaboration. This new collaboration paradigm organizes and integrates resources, tools, and people around the computational concept of a work activity, with the goal of increasing work quality and efficiency. In essence, activity-centric collaboration is an important and compelling example of contextual collaboration. Activity Explorer emerged from a multiyear research effort on activity-centric collaboration. This paper presents an overview of the most significant milestones of this research program and highlights the most interesting findings. The research behind Activity Explorer is based on many empirical studies, design explorations, and infrastructural engineering and technical simulations. We demonstrate how our research not only influenced product direction, but also the IBM vision for activity-centric collaboration.