An ontology-based approach to role-human assignment in human processes for knowledge intensive services

Abstract

Knowledge intensive service processes should be managed in a human-oriented way since human workers who naturally undertake complex operations of an intellectual nature in the processes are the most valuable resources for service-providing companies. For the human-oriented management, a role-based approach has been widely applied. The foremost step in the role-based human process management is to assign relevant roles to appropriate humans. The role assignment task is also highly dependent on the ability of humans to consider information about roles and humans. In order to manage the role assignment in a human-oriented way, this paper presents two fundamental principles upon which the assignment task is carried out. First, roles should not be assigned until they need to be activated; second, the authority for the role assignment should be distributed to participants in the processes. In order to support the principles, the information should be explicitly and formally described to enable all the participants to easily understand and utilize it. Consequently, this paper proposes a methodology for managing the role assignment in a human-oriented way by adopting an ontological approach which can precisely describe the information. From the proposed methodology, human workers can be notified which roles are triggered to be activated and wait to be assigned. Moreover, they can be provided appropriate candidate humans when carrying out the assignment task. The contribution of this paper is to suggest a role assignment methodology that not only lightens the assignment workload by providing the capability of identifying a small set of appropriate candidates but also enables the efficient assignment by streamlining the assignment task. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.