Business Conversation Manager: Facilitating People Interactions in Outsourcing Service Engagements

摘要

People involved in outsourcing services work through collaboration, conversations and ad-hoc activities and often follow guidelines that are described in best practice frameworks. There are two main issues hindering the efficient support of best practice frameworks in outsourcing services: lack of visibility into how the work is done that prevents repeatability, and conducting best practice processes that are ad-hoc and dynamically defined and refined. In this paper, we present Business Conversation Manager (BCM) that enables and drives business conversations among people around best practice processes. It supports the dynamic definition and refinement of a process in a collaborative and flexible manner. The ad-hoc processes are backed with a semi-formal process model that maintains the model of interactions and an execution engine. We present the implementation of a prototype BCM and its application in outsourcing services. It supports making processes from best practices among people more transparent, repeatable and traceable.