With the advent of Web 2.0 and online social interactions, people started sharing thoughts, contents and tasks online. This evolved to cover also socialization of task management, which is currently supported by a plethora of online services directed to the final user. However, all these tools share a common weakness: they don't provide any way for structuring the interactions, dependencies or constraints between tasks. This talk discusses a vision towards the application of BPM techniques and tools to personal task management. The challenge of this roadmap is finding the appropriate level of complexity of processes: the language for modeling such processes should be complete enough for describing basic processes but also simple enough to let people understand, accept and use them in their everyday life. Therefore, our proposal describes how to strip off some of the expressive power of enterprise business processes, so as to accommodate end user needs and acceptance. Simplification of expressive power has been carried out based on the observation that end users have rather simple needs and usually aim at describing collaborative activities performed together with their acquaintances. In our informal investigation with users, by asking them to design some typical personal workflows, we noticed that: 1. Users don't need personal process management in the sense of structuring their own workplans, because for that purpose they are happy enough with plain tasklists (possibly based on temporal deadlines) with no particular structure. 2. Users want to easily specify task assignment to friends. 3. Users want to describe simple sequential constraints between tasks or the possibility of performing actions altogether. 4. Users don't want to deal with complex decision points, involving definition of conditional expressions, complex event management, or exceedingly complex process structures. Based on this, we propose a PPM model that is based on BPM practices but actually covers a fairly reduced expressive power. In particular, our execution model covers only the design of process types that comprise: atomic tasks, sequential task dependency, and parallel execution. Assignment of one task is allowed to one and only one person. The design consists of task types, assigned to actual people (not roles). Therefore, the reuse of process models (in the sense of having several executions of them) is possible but not really frequent. This being said, also the visual notation that one can apply for representing this kind of processes can be a stripped down version of well-known standardized tasks. In particular, we propose to start from a notation that only includes two elements: atomic tasks, represented by white boxes, which can be assigned to one person; sequential dependencies, represented by directed arcs between boxes; parallel execution, represented by two or more branches.

1. Application and Simplification
of BPM Techniques
for Personal Process Management
Marco Brambilla
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano
Contact:
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
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BPMS2 Workshop, Tallin, September 3, 2012

2. Outline
• The goals of social BPM
• A BPMN-based notation for social BPM
• An approach for fast prototyping
• Conclusions

3. Personal processes: the idea
Context:
• Social Networking
• Social sharing of content
 Evolution towards socialization of task management
• plethora of online services directed to the end
user for building and sharing todo lists, such as
RememberTheMilk, Astrid, and many others

4. Online task management
• Huge list
• Widespread products
• Diverse features
• No coverage of
any process-related
feature
(not even sequence
of tasks)

5. Contribution of this work
• A vision towards social and personal process
management oriented to end users instead of
businesses
• A proposal of simplified modeling language for
personal processes
• A proof of concept tool for modeling and executing
persona processes
• A preliminary validation with some users

6. Simplified modeling language
• Obtained stripping down to the core the features of
traditional BP modeling languages
• Basically allowing only:
• Atomic tasks
• Sequence
• Parallel
• Assignment to single users
• Crucial reductions:
• No roles
• No conditions
• No OR / XOR splitting
• Very radical simplifications!!

7. Sample model
• Obtained stripping down to the core the features of
traditional BP modeling languages
• Basically allowing only:
• Atomic tasks
• Sequence
• Parallel
• Assignment to single users
• Crucial reductions:
• No roles
• No conditions
• No OR / XOR splitting
• Very radical simplifications

8. Tool implementation

9. DEMO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou6N7jWh0kA

10. Conclusions and future work
Personal processes are likely to become the next important
automation of personal life (after calendar, agenda, todo
lists,..)
We proposed a very simple yet effective notation.
Surprisingly enough, users did not miss the huge amount of
features we left out from our modeling language.
Future work
• Complete the implementation of model editor and online
execution platform
• Investigate the acceptance (by end users) of alternative
process models and choose the optimal one

11. Thanks.
For questions please contact:
Marco Brambilla
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
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