The Organizational Memory Information System PRINCE

Business process management has become an area of increasing interest in the last years. However, the acquisition of the information about business processes itself becomes a complex task since this information is spread over different people, quite often is inconsistent, and often is only available implicitly in the minds of the people involved in the processes. Within this paper we describe our work on a cooperative information system PRINCE serving as an organisational memory information system. The goal of the system is to support the systematic management of business processes capturing process information, structuring it, and preserving it in a way to be used during the different phases of a process management lifecycle. The system is able to manage information of different multimedia object types (such as text, audio and video documents). It can be used by different users giving dedicated access rights (both for filling and retrieving information). Since the information base is cooperatively filled by different users several mechanisms like consistency / inconsistency indication, information abonements etc. have been introduced for managing the huge amount of information.