Business Process Personalization Through Web Widgets

Abstract

Widget aggregators such as iGoogle and Netvibes are broadly adopted by the mass market. They enable end-users to personalize their environment with their preferred services (Widgets). However, the usage in an enterprise context is not yet investigated. In this paper, we firstly show that in addition to personalization capability, the integration of business processes should be considered. Secondly, we propose a new Widget aggregator that enables the end-user to personalize a business process by chaining Widgets according to his/her needs and habits. Thirdly, we introduce a new approach for specifying an end-user process; an approach which enables even ordinary end-users, without computing skills, to define their processes. Finally, we validate these concepts by implementing and testing a prototype. As a consequence, this work does not only impact Widget aggregators, but it also innovates in end-user service creation research by proposing an intuitive tool, understandable even by ordinary end-users, for specifying their processes (composite services).