Automated workplace design and reconfiguration for e-commerce systems using business processes

A workplace application provides an interactive electronic working environment that assists business users to fulfill tasks required in business processes. In today's ever-changing environment, business processes are constantly being customized to reflect the up-to-date organizational structure and business objectives. It is a challenging task to design and maintain a workplace application, which needs continuous improvement to adapt to the changes in business processes. Moreover, to achieve the growing requirements from the business world, workplace applications have been gradually evolved and provide sophisticated functional features in user interfaces. However, such rich features are often not obvious for users to navigate in the user interfaces (UIs). As a result, business users, especially novice business users, may have difficulties in using these workplace applications to fulfill business duties. These problems result in increase in operational cost and decrease in work efficiency.; To support evolving business processes, we design and develop the techniques and a workplace generation framework that automatically analyzes workflows (i.e. business process specifications) and generates workplace applications. To improve the usability of workplace applications, we leverage contextual information in workflows and guide business users to accomplish their work more efficiently and effectively. To minimize the interruption to business users' work and simplify the deployment of changes in business processes, we incorporate a dynamic reconfiguration process into our framework to allow updating workplace applications at run-time. A prototype tool is developed to automatically generate workplace applications using workflows in the e-commerce domain. We finally used several cases studies to evaluate the effectiveness of this framework.