active knowledge delivery in semi-structured administrative processes gregory mentzas information...

Active Knowledge Delivery in Semi-Structured Administrative Processes

Gregory MentzasInformation Management UnitNational Technical University of Athens [email protected]

Andreas AbeckerKnowledge Management DeptGerman Research Center for Artif. Intelligence [email protected]

Workshop on Electronic Government & Knowledge ManagementSiena, Italy, May 22-24, 2001

DFKI, ICCS, PLANET-EY, SEMA, DHC, IKA 2

Overview Some facts and figures about

the DECOR project Basic assumptions and the

„overall picture“ Core technical goals and their

relevance for E-Government: Active knowledge delivery Weakly-structured processes Process-oriented structured

archives

The IKA example Summary


DECOR is a two-years European R&D project developing and testing new knowledge management methods and tools

DECOR - delivery of context-sensitive organizational knowledge

6 partners from 3 European countries

runs in the Information Society Technology Programme (IST), within the

European Union's Fifth RT Framework Programme (1998-2002)

overall funding by the European Commission 1.8 MECU - under contract

No. IST-1999-13002

Project duration: July 2000 – June 2002

Main idea: Business-Process Oriented Knowledge Management for

Administrative Processes

DECOR facts and figures


The DECOR consortium consists of technology and method providers, consultants, and end users

DECOR partner organizations

IKA - the mostimportant social security institution in Greece

PLANETERNST & YOUNG - Greek management consultancy company DHC - an innovative IT

consulting and software development firm in the SAP area

SEMA Group Benelux - one of Europe‘s leading IT consulting and systems integration companies

DFKI - the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

ICCS / IMU – Information Management Unit of the National Technical University of Athens


DECOR demonstrates knowledge-based document orga-nization and process-embedded, active document delivery

intelligent document archives can effectively support knowledge-intensive work

documents can be indexed and organized according to multiple criteria and different viewpoints

models for document organization may themselves be complex structures

document organization models („ontologies“) provide flexible use for information access

ontologies contain background knowledge for better search and retrieval

Basic assumptions (1/2)


DECOR demonstrates knowledge-based document orga-nization and process-embedded, active document delivery

formal representations of a company‘s work routines and business

processes are useful knowledge organization model

in a given work procedure, employees often spend much time for

(sometimes unsuccessful) information search

the specific information requirements of a

given task can be analysed in advance and

automatically fulfilled during process enactment

dynamic process context and formal models of

the business process domain improve search

Basic assumptions (2/2)

How do the DECOR modules play together?

Start

purchase

Specify

good to buy

Good =

„Hardware“

Good =

„Software“

Price >= 300 €

Price < 300 €

Par. 370324

Specify detailed

HW parameters

Weakly-structured

workflows represent

knowledge-intensive

business processes

Augmented workflow models

describe information flow between

work activities and information

needs for specific tasks

For augmented work-

flow and associated

indexing ontologies,

modelling tools

and a methodology for

organisational

take-up are developed.

The pilot systems are

built on top of concep-

tually indexed archives

with domain ontologies and

business process models

as indexing structures.

The information

assistant observes

the running work-

flow and offers

active, context-

sensitive

organisational

knowledge, thus

promoting a better

exploitation

of existing know-

ledge sources.


The technical realization for active knowledge delivery extends conventional workflow concepts

Active knowledge delivery (1/2)

RetrievalAgent

SourcesInformation

Sources

WF ControlData

WorkflowEngine

WorklistHandler

Applications

WF ApplicationData

invokes

+Extensions

forknowledge-

intensiveTasks

BusinessProcessModel

interpreted by

WF Rele-vant Data

+Extensions

support


Active knowledge delivery enhances the quality of service for E-Government processes

Active knowledge delivery (2/2)

Active knowledge supply prevents that important knowledge or obligatory

information are overseen; compliance with binding (legal) regulations is

ensured

Active hints to other employees’ decisions enable equal decisions under equal

conditions and foster communication between employees

Active knowledge push ensures the dissemination of new knowledge (changed

laws etc.)

The “normal citizen” involved, e.g. via a Web interface, into an administrative

process can be part of complex processes without having in advance all

required background knowledge

Enhanced transparency even in “one-stop government” (Lenk and Traunmüller, 2000,

“innovative ways of service delivery”)


The DECOR workflow concept is motivated by the characteristics of knowledge-intensive work

Weakly-structured processes (1/3)

Knowledge-intensive work is often ad-hoc to a some extent;

but not without any regularities, commonalities, and structure

Knowledge-intensive work varies along the project-process spectrum:

often no strong sequential order, but lists of required activities

often cyclic, chaotic order of steps, but logical dependencies

however, sequential parts or reusable templates for parts

at least some MS project like, or Timex like support possible

sort of top-down refinement useful while actually executing the process

Cp. (Wimmer & Traunmüller, 2000), „type 2 administrative processes“:semi-formal procedures, several people with conflicting interests involved in negotiation and decision making


DECOR’s weak-workflow support shall combine a project manager’s flexibility with traditional workflow’s complexity handling

Design goals:

1. Workflow management system as an assistant

2. Hierarchical decomposition

3. Modeling and enactment interleaved

4. Expressive process logic

5. Context-sensitive knowledge delivery

low high

reuseability

modifiability

complexity

knowledge usage

uniqueness

predictability

spontaneousmodeling decisions

structure

project management system traditional workflow



Several reasons ask for weakly-structured process support in Electronic Government

Some workflow support is useful anyway: many people, many documents and maybe many locations are involved; enforcing a given process structure through a workflow system may improve quality of

services and definitely increases throughput

Reasons for weak process structures: Long-living processes may change because of changing environment (regulations,

information situation, political decisions) during their enactment (see the work by Maurer et al. [MILOS System] about urban planning)

Many administrative processes are very well structured in general, but contain few central decision steps which are not further regulated, but could be planned

In some highly-complex and safety-critical administration processes, no a-priori-planning is possible, but process instances must be recorded and documented for legal reasons (DFKI currently examines such a process in the area of nuclear transports)


Cp. (Lenk & Traunmüller, 2000) about E-Government processes: “They are partly … structured by legal rules which however, often demand interpretation …”


The technical basis for the DECOR intelligent archive is DHC‘s CognoVision® product

Process-based structured archives (1/4)

Knowledge objects (documents) are enriched with Metadata (author, content, quality, actuality, ...) Links to other documents Links to content-describing ontology concepts and business process

elements An ontology is an „ ... explicit representation of the shared conceptualization of a

given domain. ...“, i.e., it specifies the common vocabulary and basic assumptions (concepts, relationships, axioms) used by a number of actors to talk about a given domain

Ontologies provide the index terms for describing document content and can be used for manual navigation, information retrieval, query expansion, etc.

In DECOR, the CognoVision® tool is used as document management system: In CognoVision®, arbitrary networks (representing ontologies) can be built

from structure elements and attributed links Documents (maybe different versions) and metadata are grouped in

information units and linked to structure elements

The CognoVision® tool (DHC) allows to establish multiple views and manifold links between documents



content of info unit 2

other info units linked to info

unit 1

links to / from information unit

1

content of information unit

1

structure elements linked

to info unit 1

structure elements liked to info unit 2

information unitslinked to info unit 2

Information units group documents, metadata, and links to structure elements / other information units in CognoVision®



Ontologies and metadata are well-suited concepts for knowledge organization in E-Government


Importance of intelligent document repositories with a coherent

view on heterogeneous input material: Many different sources of knowledge: laws, comments to laws, specific

regulations, old similar cases, available case-specific documents and

information

Often, no explicit links between related knowledge items possible

Often, knowledge items prevalent at different places and in different forms and

representations, at several degrees of formality

The E-Government domain is well suited for modeling background

ontologies: Many topics (especially legal regulations) are formal by nature

People with formal education exist which can assist in knowledge acquisition

Once built, formal ontologies can be resued for different purposes: navigation

and retrieval support, explanation, reasoning, education purposes, etc.


IKA is the largest and most important organization for social security in Greece

Some facts and figures:

330 insurance branches and 360 health branches all over the country

A total personnel of 23,000 permanent employees (administrative- medical personnel and doctors)

Medical treatment to 5,6 million directly and indirectly insured people

Pensions to 1.000.000 pensioners

IKA offers a wide range of services, which fall under four categories:

Insurance

Benefits in kind and in cash

Pensions

Interstate social security

IKA case study (1/4)


In DECOR we consider the process for granting full old age pension

A business process of high importance for the institution: Current beneficiaries amount to 1.000.000 persons Annual increase rate: 10% Time-consuming process, resulting in long delays in the completion of the process

A knowledge-intensive business process: A deep knowledge of the relevant legislation is required Currently, only experienced employees are involved in the process

Departments and roles involved in the business process: The pension secretariat The department of pensions or the department of payments The director of the branch

Source material involved in the business process: The source material is mainly in the form of documents It includes standard administrative forms, legal documents, official documents, etc.



The business process has been analysed from the knowledge perspective

Basic business process tasks:

Submission of application form and supplementary documentation (pension folder)

Check of the pension folder

Processing of the pension folder

Establishment of entitlement right to receive a pension

Calculation of the pension amount

Notification of the insured person on the final decision

The DECOR Business Knowledge Method combines elements from CommonKADS

(knowledge-oriented process analysis) and IDEF5 (ontology modeling)


Ontology refinement

Ontology creation

Task analysis

Business Process Analysis

Business Process

Identification


Expected benefits in the IKA pilot

Short term benefits: Workflow introduction and electronic documents smoothen process

enactment, ease communication, and decrease processing time Active knowledge delivery facilitates access to legal documents and

comments Weak workflow structures don‘t play a significant role in this case

study Long term benefits:

Access to older, similar cases facilitates comparable decisions Assessment of „similarity“ not trivial

Presentation of similar cases fosters communication with colleagues Exploitation of tacit knowledge as most important knowledge source

Attachment of personal notes to legal resources and backup material improves personal views on knowledge base



Some words on related work Process-oriented structured archives

Multiple-viewpoint organization possible in many state-of-the-art document management tools (Autonomy, ...)

CognoVision® tool provides extremely expressive structures Method-embedding and maintenance support not available on market

Weak workflow structures Several research projects and very few commercial tools with similar goals => market

study under work Coupling with knowledge delivery unique for DECOR

Active, context-sensitive knowledge delivery Active push services are state-of-the-art in many commercial KM tools, but do not take into

account the actual work context Research approaches:

„Attentive systems“ (WATSON): try to deduce local work context from open applications and document content => ignore global task context

„EULE 2“ (Reimer et al): knowledge-rich, formal model of administrative workflow, rights, obligations, regulations, etc. => excellent services, but expensive knowledge engineering

Conclusions (1/2)

Use of such approaches for Electronic Government: not known to us


Summary Project status: Three case studies have been analysed Archives are being installed Ontologies have been built in the first

instance Workflow is in the design phase

Next steps: Fill archives with operational data Document classification support Develop workflow formalism and engine

Transfer of the concept to a real-world E-Government scenario not yet done

Conclusions (2/2)