  Monitoring the execution of business processes and activities composing them
is an essential capability of Business Process Management (BPM) Suites. Human
tasks are a particular type of business activities, and the understanding of
their execution is essential in effectively managing both the processes and
human resources. This paper proposes a monitoring framework with a capability
to monitor and analyze the human tasks in a domain specific setting and
contextually correlate the task execution patterns to the workload distribution
on human users. The framework uses the notion of concept probes that match the
business concepts used in definition of business processes. The proposed human
task monitoring and contextual analysis (HTMCA) component considers multiple
artifacts involved in the execution of a human task, rather than focusing only
on classic activity/task metrics retrieved from BPM engines.This approach
aspires to provide two main advantages to organizations using it. Firstly, it
enhances the understanding of the workload of human users that participate in
people-intensive business processes under various roles. Secondly, it gives
organizations tools and insight for fine-tuning their user performance taking
into account the specific context of their business various artifacts domains.
The proposed framework builds on previous work that lays the basis of
vendor-independent, concept-centric BPM monitoring, and provides the critical
missing element of human task understanding. This has the potential to
significantly benefit any BPM deployment and the validation work is in advanced
stages of building a full prototype that demonstrates this value in a realistic
industrial setting.
