Flávia Maria Santoro

Applying Group Storytelling in Knowledge Management

Knowledge management and, specifically, organizational memory have become vital for organizations’ life. Documenting tacit knowledge used to perform daily activities, such as, discussions and decisions is a complex task. Another challenge is dealing with collective knowledge, because an important part of organizational work is executed in a cooperative mode. In this paper, we present stories as an important tool to externalize tacit knowledge. We describe TELLSTORY, a system that supports the collaborative construction of stories. Based on the characteristics of traditional literary and journalistic narrative structure, TELLSTORY helps teams in developing stories to make explicit tacit knowledge elements.

A context-based model for Knowledge Management embodied in work processes

Knowledge Management has become a prominent subject for organizations, but often the information that flows in a well-defined design work process is not characterized and treated in such a way as to promote its reuse. We argue that context is a fundamental information resource for improving how activities and interactions are understood and carried on. Our premise is that it is important for organizational learning that decisions, solutions, discussions and actions executed in work processes should be retrievable. We describe an environment that supports the cycle of creating and dealing with information about activities and interactions, focusing on their context. A formal ontology-based representation of context is presented to support the use of this environment. Two case studies are described and their results analyzed. The goal of this paper is to discuss and specify mechanisms that can be used to collect contextual information within such an environment.

A Method for Service Identification from Business Process Models in a SOA Approach

Various approaches for services development in SOA propose business processes as a starting point. However, there is a lack of systematic methods for services identification during business analysis. We believe that there has to exist a integrated view of organizational business processes to promote an effective SOA approach, which will improve IS requirements understanding. In this context, we propose a method, and a detailed set of activities, for guiding the service designer in identifying the most appropriate set of services to support organization business activities. The method was applied in a real scenario of a Brazilian Petroleum organization.

Acquiring knowledge on business processes from stakeholders' stories

Business process modeling is expensive and time consuming. It largely depends on the elicitation method and the person in charge. The model needs to be shared in order to promote multiple perspectives. This paper describes a group storytelling approach as an alternative to the traditional individual interviews to elicitate processes. Information gathering is proposed to be done through capturing the stories told by process performers, who describe their work, difficulties and suggestions. A process to abstract and transform stories into business process representations is also part of the method. A tool to support storytelling and this transformation is described as well.

Collaboration and knowledge sharing in network organizations

Abstract A network organization comprises a new type of environment around which people organize themselves so as to reach a common objective. A network organization enables the recommended interaction among people with different backgrounds, which happens when the problems they deal with are complex and multidisciplinary. Most network organizations require interactions in a geographically distributed fashion, fostering the serious challenge of displaying coherence of purpose necessary for global efficacy as from local activity: these features require an environment with special functionality. This paper describes and analyzes a collaborative environment for support to knowledge sharing and coordination of actions in geographically distributed network organizations. A case-study using the collaborative environment is presented, and the results obtained by using this environment are discussed.

Reflections on the modularity of business process models: The case for introducing the aspect‐oriented paradigm

Purpose – The aspect‐oriented (AO) paradigm is first proposed to deal with programing modularity issues, but different researchers have been exploring AO concepts in the designing and definition of software systems. The goal of this paper is to discuss and present a proposal that addresses the application of AO concepts to the design of business processes (BPs) in order to improve usability and understandability of process models.Design/methodology/approach – The paper departs from previous work on analyzing the application of AO for software design. The observations were backed by a case study, which was used to illustrate the issues by means of examples.Findings – The paper presents findings on important issues related to the integration of AO paradigm and BP modeling, such as crosscutting representation, crosscutting composition, quantification, and join point exposure.Originality/value – The paper explores a new frontier: the application of AO concepts to the design of BPs. As of now, few works have e...

A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing the Use of Context in Groupware

This article presents a conceptual framework for the identification and classification of contextual elements included in groupware applications. Contextual elements store information that helps group members to characterize and to understand the interaction and its associate information. The conceptual framework can be used not only to guide the development of new groupware applications but also to analyze existing groupware. We illustrate the use of the framework in the analysis of three groupware tools.

Towards Collaboration Maturity in Business Processes: An Exploratory Study in Oil Production Processes

Abstract Organizations have been relying on collaboration for knowledge sharing and productivity improvement in order to reduce costs or boost revenue. However, organizations still cannot assure that collaboration is properly conducted in daily work. This paper presents an approach to stimulating collaboration between professionals in an organization. The approach, combining a BPM methodology with the CollabMM collaboration maturity model and its corresponding method, is a result of an exploratory study in a real setting in an oil company in Brazil. The project is a move towards improving decision-making during one of the companys business processes and establishing collaboration among professionals through information sharing.

CEPE: Cooperative Editor for Processes Elicitation

Companies normally hire external consultants to carry out their business process re-engineering. While this can be straightforward in the short term, it does not produce the desired results in the mid and long term. A low level of worker involvement and a continuous dependency on external consultancy are the main drawbacks. We propose an alternative approach to BPR, specifically to workflow design, where company workers play an active role in re-designing the organizations processes in a cooperative style. The paper describes the essence of a BPR method based on participatory design and stepwise refinement which we believe will generate better results than the traditional approach. We describe in detail the CEPE tool: Cooperative Editor for Processes Elicitation, which is a cooperative graphic editor that supports the building of the knowledge about the current process and its associated problems. That is the second phase of the proposed method.

The CSCW Lab for Groupware Evaluation

The aim of this paper is to report the initiative of a research project called the CSCW Lab. The CSCW Lab is an approach for applying evaluation methodologies in the context of a groupware research group. We identify the major dimensions of groupware evaluation and describe how the CSCW Lab addresses them. The first experiments using CSCW Lab are also described.