Ownership and Evolution of Local Process Representations

Knowledge workers tailor collaborative business processes to local conditions. They own (i.e., create and maintain) representations of these local processes (such as checklists) to guide the work. Our goal is to design tools to support the ownership of collaborative local processes by enabling workers to flexibly adapt process representations to work situations. This paper focuses on how workers evolve representations for collaborative, locally-owned processes by updating them from situated experiences to keep up with changing business conditions. To understand this, we conducted a field study and a lab study. From the field study, we describe how factors like group roles and documentation purposes affect the evolution of process representations. Based on these observations, we propose a model of the practice of evolving local process representations that provides a framework for understanding activity documentation needs. The lab study then provides behavioral details on the ways people carried out the evolution practice. These studies yield design implications for collaborative activity support tools.