Groupware Mail Messages Analysis for Mining Collaborative Processes

Nowadays, the most of the research related to workflows has considered the management of formal business processes. There has been some discussion of informal processes, often under names such as “artful business processes”: informal processes are typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, etc.), the so called “knowledge workers”. With their skills, experience and knowledge, they are used to perform difficult tasks, which require complex, rapid decisions among multiple possible strategies, in order to fulfill specific goals. In contrast to business processes that are formal and standardized, often informal processes are not even written down, let alone defined formally, and can vary from person to person even when those involved are pursuing the same objective. Knowledge workers create informal processes “on the fly” to cope with many of the situations that arise in their daily work. While informal processes are frequently repeated, since they are not written down, they are not exactly reproducible, even by their originators, nor can they be easily shared. Their outcome releases and their information exchanges are very often done by means of e-mail conversations, which are a fast, reliable, permanent way of keeping track of the activities that they fulfill. The objective of the research proposed in this position document is to automatically build, on top of a collection of e-mails, a set of workflow models that represent the artful processes which lay behind the knowledge workers activities.