This document summarizes a workshop on designing systems for managing collaborative research processes. It discusses why collaborative research workflows are important given an emphasis on collaborative work in funding. It explores potential research process characteristics and benefits and risks of automating such processes. It then analyzes different aspects of collaborative research processes like work distribution, monitoring, audit, self-organization, and strategy using concepts from cybernetics and the Viable Systems Model. Finally, it discusses observations that collaborative processes require more flexible approaches than traditional business process management methods allow and outlines areas for future work.

1. TENCompetence Workshop, Manchester 2007 Designing Systems for Managing Collaborative Research Processes Scott Wilson, CETIS; Yoichi Takayama, Ernie Ghiglione, James Dalziel, MELCOE This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence

9. Simple workflow…

10. … can exhibit complex behaviour

13. Simplified VSM (Liber & Britain, 2004)

16. Simplistic concepts of work distribution abound in IT systems…

17. But simplicity can be deceptive! In some cases it just pushes complexity to the outside

29. Modified WfMC Reference Model