Advanced Concepts for Task List Lifecycle Support

Globalization and the shift towards a knowledge-based society have increased the importance of knowledge work and in particular knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) in highly developed countries. As a result, knowledge workers demand suitable information systems supporting their collaboration in knowledge-intensive processes. However, due to their difficult characteristics, there is still no such adequate support for KiPs. A KiP-supporting system needs to provide digital, lifecycle-based task lists to ensure sustainable support. Today, knowledge workers usually organize and manage their collaborative work in a KiP using paper-based task lists, e.g. to-do lists or checklists. Although task lists are intuitive and widely used, their current implementations tend to be ineffective and error-prone. Task lists are neither synchronized nor accessible by several knowledge workers simultaneously. In addition, no task list lifecycle support is provided and media disruptions aggravate task management. As a consequence, the efforts of knowledge workers in task management are not exploited for the optimization of future KiPs.

As part of the proCollab research project, this thesis addresses advanced concepts to support the task list lifecycle. For this purpose, existing lifecycle concepts are adapted and improved in particular. To allow an adequate comparison of task lists, an approach for a similarity analysis, on which the advanced concepts are based, is proposed first. As it is not always possible to create a suitable task list in advance, an approach for the automatic generation of a task list template from completed task list instances is presented. Furthermore, an approach for optimizing existing task list templates by incorporating the most frequent changes applied to task lists in use is explained. An additional approach for analyzing and identifying nested insert operations is proposed to extend and improve the optimization of existing task list templates. The presented concepts are together implemented in the current proCollab proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate their feasibility and applicability. Therefore, various services and a central REST interface as well as a comprehensive test framework are implemented.