The willingness of non-programmers to develop or modify their software depends not only on using the right interfaces and programming model but also on users making positive judgment about the balance of benefits and costs such as learning time and errors. This paper reports on a questionnaire-based survey which charts this economic dimension of End-User Development (EUD) within the area of task management. The survey explores the extent of EUD practices, gauges end user's perceptions of EUD risks, benefits and proposed supporting actions, and identifies factors which facilitate EUD practices.
The need to involve business users in process modeling is largely perceived in the context of Business Process Management systems. This can facilitate the elaboration of consistent process models which are better turned to users' needs and organizational changes. Despite the variety of tools and notations, process modeling remains hardly accessible for business users, who lack advanced technical skills. This paper presents an integrated approach for end-user driven business process modeling which uses web service based activity tracking to generate weakly-structured process models by capturing data on personal task management. These models can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal workflows by delivering the business knowledge to process designers and software developers. Interconnection of ad-hoc and formal workflows results in enhanced process flexibility and allows complementation of formal workflows through deviations at runtime. The approach is validated through the Collaborative Task Management (CTM) prototype.
Letting end users tailor business processes can result in business process management support, which is better turned to users' needs and organizational changes. However, such tailoring requires not only the users' domain expertise but also advanced skills in computer use, which business users mostly lack. The paper presents the design of the Collaborative Task Manager (CTM) prototype which overcomes this limitation and enables end users to become informed participants in business process composition. CTM uses enterprise-wide "programming by example" by exposing common functionalities for personal task management to the end users and tracking their activities to generate end-to-end process execution examples on a central instance. These can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal process models, which enables tailoring as collaboration between business users, end-user tailors and developers. The paper finally reports on trial usage of the tool at a partner company.
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