Academy TechNotes
ATN Volume 3, Number 6, 2012
Geo-Location Improves Business Process Management Human Task Assignment
M
ost Business Process Management (BPM) solutions
assign human tasks to specific participants or
groups of participants. Human tasks are activities
or steps in the process. For example, if a specific
human task in a process is to be performed by a “claims
reviewer”, a number of options exist today: the BPM engine can add the task to the “claims reviewers” queue,
waiting for a member of that group to claim it; the BPM
engine can randomly assign the task to any member of
the “claims reviewers” group; or the BPM engine can assign the task to a specific registered participant (e.g., the
task is assigned to John Smith). Most BPM engines assign
human tasks regardless of the assigned participant’s
availability or geographic location. Even with the use of
email or SMS notification mechanisms, or with the use of
escalation mechanisms (e.g., automatic re-assignment),
a large number of human tasks end up being idle, unclaimed, and not making progress.
Most BPM solutions rely solely
on static data
about
participants.
The
data is defined
when users register with the
system.
This
data is stored in
user
registries
such as LDAP
and user profiles.
This significantly limits the ability to do effective task assignment. For example, it seems very ineffective to assign
an approval task to a manager if she is on a plane with
no connection. Or, how can we assign a customer complaint call to the technician who is already in the customer’s neighborhood?
We propose the use of geo-location and user availability
status data to more effectively perform human task assignment. The BPM engine assigns tasks only to end users
who are available (connected/online) and at the best
location to handle the work.
This can be implemented by augmenting a BPM engine,
adding dynamic user availability status and geo-location
metadata to activities, business objects (the information
that flows through the process), and participants. Just
before it assigns the human task, the BPM engine
compares the geo-location data of the activity to the
geo-location data of the end users currently logged in,
and assigns the task to the closest available.
Suraj Shinde & Bertrand Portier
The solution may be implemented by extending an existing BPM engine’s mechanism. Firstly, a configuration step
is required to augment the engine’s metamodel with “location” attributes. For example, the engine needs to be
aware of an activity’s location and a participant’s location. Secondly, the BPM client application is enhanced,
capturing information about participants’ status (available or not) and geo-location information. This is a natural evolution in mobile clients (web, native, or hybrid). For
example, HTML 5 provides a geo-location API. Thirdly, at
runtime, the BPM engine keeps track of which participants are available and where – this is dynamic information, which is not available at design time. For the available users, the BPM engine compares their geo-location
data to the activity's geo-location data and assigns the
human task to the closest available participant.
In this tech note, we propose an improvement to the traditional BPM human task assignment where the BPM engine uses information
about a process participant’s availability and
geographic location. This
improvement is very relevant to today’s mobile
workforce and has the
potential to dramatically
improve the execution of
an enterprise’s business
processes in the following
manner:

Reducing costs by minimizing wait time costs and
reducing travel expenses.

Speeding up the execution of business processes
by avoiding the delays caused when business
tasks are assigned to users who are unavailable.

Improving the efficiency of business processes by
assigning business tasks to users who are geographically better positioned to handle these
tasks.
DISCLAIMER: To protect the privacy of individuals, any implementation of this idea should consider a feature within the mobile
client to seek permission of the individual before activating
transmission of geo-location data to the BPM engine.
About the Authors: Suraj Shinde is AIS Leader with
GBS, Mexico and Bertrand Portier is an IBM Executive
IT Architect with SWG, U.S. Both are members of the
IBM Academy of Technology.
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