Business Conversation Manager: Facilitating People Interactions in Outsourcing Service Engagements

People involved in outsourcing services work through

collaboration, conversations and ad-hoc

activities and often follow guidelines that are described in best practice frameworks. There are two main issues hindering the efficient support of best practice frameworks in outsourcing services: lack of

visibility

into how the work is done that prevents

repeatability

, and conducting best practice processes that are

ad-hoc

and

dynamically defined and refined

. In this paper, we present Business Conversation Manager (BCM) that enables and drives business conversations among people around best practice processes. It supports the dynamic definition and refinement of a process in a collaborative and flexible manner. The ad-hoc processes are backed with a semi-formal process model that maintains the model of interactions and an execution engine. We present the implementation of a prototype BCM and its application in outsourcing services. It supports making processes from best practices among people more transparent, repeatable and traceable.