Business Conversation Manager: Facilitating People Interactions in Outsourcing Service Engagements

 Business Conversation Manager: Facilitating People Interactions in Outsourcing Service Engagements Hamid R. Motahari-Nezhad, Sven Graupner, Sharad Singhal HP Laboratories HPL-2010-106 Ad-hoc Business Processes, Collaborations, Outsourcing Services People involved in outsourcing services work through collaboration, conversations and ad-hoc activities and often follow guidelines that are described in best practice frameworks. There are two main issues hindering the efficient support of best practice frameworks in outsourcing services: lack of visibility into how the work is done that prevents repeatability, and conducting best practice processes that are ad-hoc and dynamically defined and refined. In this paper, we present Business Conversation Manager (BCM) that enables and drives business conversations among people around best practice processes. It supports the dynamic definition and refinement of a process in a collaborative and flexible manner. The ad-hoc processes are backed with a semi-formal process model that maintains the model of interactions and an execution engine. We present the implementation of a prototype BCM and its application in outsourcing services. It supports making processes from best practices among people more transparent, repeatable and traceable. External Posting Date: September 6, 2010 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: September 6, 2010 [Fulltext] Published in the 10th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010), Vienna, Austria, July 5-9 2010. Copyright The 10th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010). Business Conversation Manager: Facilitating People Interactions in Outsourcing Service Engagements Hamid R. Motahari-Nezhad, Sven Graupner, Sharad Singhal Hewlett Packard Labs Palo Alto, USA {hamid.motahari, sven.graupner, sharad.singhal}@hp.com Abstract. People involved in outsourcing services work through collaboration, conversations and ad-hoc activities and often follow guidelines that are described in best practice frameworks. There are two main issues hindering the People involved in outsourcing services work through collaboration, conversations and ad-hoc activities and often follow guidelines that are described in best practice frameworks. There are two main issues hindering the efficient support of best practice frameworks in outsourcing services: lack of visibility into how the work is done that prevents repeatability, and conducting best practice processes that are ad-hoc and dynamically defined and refined. In this paper, we present Business Conversation Manager (BCM) that enables and drives business conversations among people around best practice processes. It supports the dynamic definition and refinement of a process in a collaborative and flexible manner. The ad-hoc processes are backed with a semi-formal process model that maintains the model of interactions and an execution engine. We present the implementation of a prototype BCM and its application in outsourcing services. It supports making processes from best practices among people more transparent, repeatable and traceable.