Modeling Evolving Human User Engagements with Cognitive Advisory Agents using the i* Framework

Organizations are increasingly looking to adopt and incorporate cognitive capabilities into key business processes (BPs) to aid their human decision-makers. Integrating advanced cognitive systems into enterprise BPs is difficult as one needs to consider not only enterprise objectives, but the social and organizational impact of these systems’ as they, for instance, affect human decision-makers and other roles. Conversely, BPs and the processes responsible for managing how human users engage with cognitive systems need to be designed to enable users to adapt to the enhanced capabilities of such systems. Redesigning cognitively-enhanced BPs may also require changes to additional supporting processes, which can emerge and evolve over a period of time to monitor, evaluate, adjust, modify, or audit the main BPs. Together these processes constitute a business process architecture. This paper uses the i* framework to model, analyze, and visualize the engagements between human process participants and cognitive business agents and aid in the selection of appropriate BP configurations that match the needs and capabilities of both human and system actors. This approach supports better integration of cognitive systems and BPs pertaining to cognitive decision-making.