Personal Process Management
A New Platform for Personal Process Management
Aims
This project aims to set new foundations for what we call 'Personal Process Management'. The project is guided by the following questions, namely; (i) how to define and create personal processes, (ii) how to effectively query and search personal processes, (iii) how to reuse and integrate existing personal processes to define a new one, (iv) how to enable personalization and sharing in personal processes.
Background
The recent emergence of Web services technologies has brought home the idea of remotely accessing the functionality of existing applications through well-defined interfaces via the ubiquitous Internet.
In the world of professional software developers, the very idea of reusing existing software components and mix-matching them to build new applications has been well documented and supported. A plethora of tools and frameworks exist (e.g., Web services development environments in J2EE or .NET) to look after the needs of the developers in their quest for building such applications.
Despite huge technology advances in the area, the power of software reuse has not been transferred to the daily activities of the computer end users. In the business or personal computing environments, where end users operate, people carry out repetitive tasks on a daily basis. We also see that, in such an environment, the knowledge gained by the people carrying out the routines is locked away (e.g., in a person’s email folder, or simply in someone’s head), inaccessible to others.
That is, even though we have sophisticated communication means available, we have no easy way of reusing or sharing our “knowledge” about how we do what we do (e.g., what do you normally do to organise a half-day workshop?, can someone else reuse the process if you could describe how you do it?). We believe that this is due to the lack of support for a systematic approach for those end-users to effectively define, automate, reuse and share the tasks. We use the term personal processes to (roughly) refer to daily, repetitive tasks. A personal process can be as simple as opening a computer account for newly arrived personnel, a finding a restaurant to go out for a Friday night and make a reservation, or as complicated as preparing an annual tax return.
Common characteristics of personal processes are that they consist of a sequence of instructions, which allows them to be described, and they may be repeated many times.
Under the project, we will develop a new and innovative platform designed for personal process management. Our vision for managing personal processes includes the following components:
- Definition, creation and storage of a personal process
- Querying and searching of personal processes
- Reuse and integration of personal processes
- Personalisation and mass sharing of personal processes
Significance and Innovation
A meeting is in 5 minutes. The email that contains the meeting agenda is missing. It is a common scenario to all of us. Wouldn’t it be nice if a meeting reminder from a calendar could also deliver all the documents relevant for the meeting? How often do we ask someone ’how do I’ or ’where is’ type questions? The huge advances in online technology have brought people closer than ever. However, increased reliance on the Internet, Intranet, email messages, calendar events, mobile devices etc., means that data and knowledge we consume for everyday tasks are more and more distributed. Improving pro- ductivity in workplace continues to be one of the biggest challenges.
The research area aiming to provide solutions to the problems is broadly identified as Personal Information Management (PIM). PIM is attracting increasing attention. For individual users, solutions to PIM means a better use of resources. For organisations, PIM solutions can bring improved productivity and can leverage the expertise of employees.
So far, the research effort has been concentrating on formalising the problem as pure data integration issues. We argue that there needs to be a new approach to the problem in which the concept of “process” and “process by-products” are taken into account. The rationale is that, in many cases, the needs for associating disconnected pieces of personal information (e.g., integrating a customer complaint email to the relevant procurement request, extracting a relevant list of people whom you can invite to the next conference) are often driven, not by data, but by a process. A process dictates the context of how, when and why certain data should be integrated.
We propose to develop a personal process management platform in which the processes (a PhD admission process) and their by-product data (e.g., a PhD admission form) are defined, searched, reused, improved and integrated. Such a system will no doubt help end-users increase productivity.
For example, our platform can automatically link an email attachment with a relevant procurement request. Even more, it can automatically pre-fetch any forms or relevant contact person information for the user to complete the next step in the procurement process. A quick and effective process search engine will help users find the answers to ’how to’ or ’where is’ type questions. This is because the repetitive nature of personal processes and knowledge from the users who perform such tasks will be automatically captured and integrated into the system. This is a fresh approach to a well-known problem. To the best of our knowledge, although we see some recent development in the area, there has not been serious effort into formalizing a research framework and developing architectures and methodologies in the integration of data from a process-oriented view point.