AWSM: Leveraging the Allocation of Workflows with Social Network Metrics

In this work, we take a first step towards incorporating ideas from Social Networks (SN) to the problem of workflow allocation. The primary contribution of this work is a methodology to allocate workflows to human agents within an organization, based on optimizing a SN measure of choice, e.g., group or team cohesiveness. The intuitive benefit is that workflows will be performed with greater efficiency and effectiveness if the group of agents performing the constituent activities are optimized along an SN measure, such as maximized group cohesiveness. Another intuitive example is to allocate workflows that require extensive working knowledge of the organization to agents that form a group optimized along maximum organizational centrality. Our contribution here is a generalized methodology we call AWSM (Allocation of Workflows with Social Network Metrics), that can used to allocate a general set of workflows within a general organization, to optimize along any SN metric.

Speaker Biography

Akhilesh Bajaj is Associate Professor of MIS, at the University of Tulsa. He received a B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1989, an MBA from Cornell University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in MIS (minor in Computer Science) from the University of Arizona in 1997. Dr. Bajaj's research deals with the construction and testing of tools and methodologies that facilitate the construction of large organizational systems, as well as studying the decision models of the actual consumers of these information systems. He has published articles in several academic journals such as Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems. He is on the editorial board of several journals in the MIS area. His research has been funded by the department of defense (DOD) via the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on basic and advanced database systems, management of information systems, and enterprise wide systems.

Dr. Bajaj has consulted with several organizations in the USA, ranging from fortune 500 to high-tech start-ups. He has also delivered executive education since 1997 to personnel ranging from the senior leadership at the National Guard to middle and senior IS managers of major profit and not-for profit organizations.

Return to the Workshop Homepage

For general information about the AMCIS 2005 conference, see http://amcis2005.isqa.unomaha.edu/