Support Services for Business Process Oriented Telework. The COBIP Project

Introduction Telework – Context and trends The telework concept provides answers to important questions raised by changes in the social, economic and technological environment of today. The following are some of the typical developments that are characteristic of those changes [10, 11, 12]: • Information and knowledge based work increases. • New concepts to improve the companies’ business processes change the way (“how” and “where”) people work. • The development of society, with new ways of life, calls for solutions that help harmonise work with family and personal life. • Powerful information and communication technologies (ICT) are becoming available and accessible to a wide range of users. Within this context, and although new technologies are still crucial for the companies’ competitiveness, it becomes more difficult to get a competitive advantage based solely on the adoption of new technologies. To be able to cope with environmental change, one must also consider new organisational concepts like telework. The new ICT, however, do offer many opportunities to improve the companies’ competitiveness. For example, the implementation of CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) and subsequent concepts helped to increase productivity in the manufacturing industries, in the past decades. Business process support technology, also, has already a long tradition. Information systems have tried to cope with this issue by transaction processing. However, previous attempts to automate office work and increase office productivity failed, mainly because individual activities were automated without an understanding of how they fit into the entire business processes. Based on the previous experience in procedure automation systems, new software products and enhanced office information systems are being developed which fall into the category of workflow management. It is not a new technology for procedure automation, but takes the formal part of procedure processing applications and combines it with general communication and information sharing facilities.