The workplace of the future will support the user to cope with a flexible change of multiple processes and tasks. The actual work context is observed by the system and this will be utilized to support the user with relevant information as well as recommendations to proceed in his work. Interaction channels and presentation means are chosen adaptively; needed knowledge and information is provided pro-actively and in direct context of the work performed. The user will have tightly integrated direct access to different services by mesh up techniques. He will collaborate via informal social networks provided by various Web 2.0 services (e.g., forums, weblogs, wikis, and Xing). Domain experts will be identified automatically through an expert finder which is driven by social mining and advanced machine learning technologies. The user will be able to change the system by the use of end-user development facilities to adapt his working environment to his actual needs and specific environments. These methodologies and technologies have been investigated in a varying depth in the research community. However, only a proper combination will lead to the desired user experience. Knowing about the (business) processes the user is involved in supports this and will form the workplace of the future significantly. Business processes are not necessarily IT-based or IT-supported.

The common presupposition of enterprise systems (ES) is that they lead to significant efficiency gains. However, this is only the case for well-implemented ES that are well-aligned with the organisation. The list of ES implementation failures is significant which is partly attributable to the insufficiently addressed fundamental problem of adapting an ES efficiently. As long as it is not intuitively possible to configure an ES, this problem will prevail because organisations have a non-generic character. A solution to this problem consists in re-thinking current practices of ES provision. This paper proposes a new approach based on configurable process models, which reflect ES functionalities. We provide in this paper a taxonomy of situations that can occur from a business perspective during process model configuration. This taxonomy is represented via so-called semantic configuration patterns. In the next step, we discuss so-called syntactic configuration patterns. This second type of configuration patterns implements the semantic configuration patterns for specific modelling techniques. We chose two popular process modelling languages in order to illustrate our approach.

The panel will discuss emerging “industrial” solutions that help programmers to develop distributed and client/server applications based on objects supporting so-called openness and heterogeneity.