Knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) have become the centerpiece for creating value in highly developed countries. Well-known KiPs are, e.g., automotive engineering projects, patient treatment cases, software development projects, research projects, or police investigations.

However, the proper operational support of KiPs constitutes a big challenge. As KiPs are emergent and unpredictable by nature, they are driven by knowledge workers utilizing their skills, experiences and expertise at run time. KiPs cannot be pre-specified like routine processes a priori and traditional process-oriented approaches just fail.  In particular, for coordinating and synchronizing their work, knowledge workers rely on task lists, such as to-do lists, task sheets, or checklists.

Though these means are intuitive and prevalent, their current implementations are highly ineffective and error-prone.  In addition, no lifecycle support is provided and media disruptions aggravate task management in the scope of KiPs. As a result, knowledge workers spend much time for inefficient and redundant work as their efforts are not preserved and exploited for optimizing future KiPs.