Using self-reconfigurable workplaces to automate the maintenance of evolving business applications

In this ever changing business environment, business processes are constantly being customized to reflect the up-to-date organizational structure and business objectives. Technology updates and innovation also affect the way business is carried out. A workplace application provides an interactive electronic working environment that integrates software applications to assist users in performing their daily work more efficiently. Managing and maintaining workplace applications within an organization is a challenging job, since it often involves labor intensive manual reconfiguration to adapt the workplace to the changes in business processes. In this paper, we propose a dynamic reconfigurable workplace framework that supports the changing nature of the business domain. This framework updates the workplace at run time, minimizes the interruption to users' work, and simplifies the evolution of a business application. The effectiveness of the framework is studied by examining changes to several business processes and the ability of the framework to update the corresponding workplaces.