MA Abschlussvortrag, Nicolas Mundbrod, Ort: O27/545, Zeit: 11:45 Uhr, Datum: 25. Januar 2012

In developed countries knowledge work is the ongoing predominant type of work based on a social and economic change from an industrial society towards a knowledge-based, post-industrial society. In their daily business processes, knowledge workers like doctors, engineers or freelancers cope with demanding situations they usually solve by leveraging their distinguished mental skills and experiences. In doing so they usually work widely autonomously, often in multiple contexts, and so their daily workload is influenced by dynamic factors like time, costs and resources. As a part of their jobs knowledge workers frequently take care of resulting coordination issues as well as they increasingly work mobile and collaborate remotely together with other workers these days. In doing so they generally rely on a variety of available supporting software respectively communication channels which often results in unpleasant circumstances. Information like documents or e-mails are distributed and unlinked, misses its contextual relation and an overall state of progress is hardly accessible. As a result a general lack of appropriate, contextual and process-related support impedes the reutilization of elaborated solutions as well as the continuous improvement of existing business processes. In this context business process management systems have been steadily advanced to improve the central, process-related support of business processes. But unfortunately these systems generally rely on the separation of planning and enactment of a business process according to Taylor’s scientific management principals. Knowledge workers’ business processes requiring emergent, unimpeded collaboration stretch these systems to their current limits. Therefore this thesis investigates the very nature of knowledge work and its involved knowledge workers, to evaluate the requirements as well as possible technologies to increase the contextual support of today’s knowledge workers.