an email based issue- tracking workflow system that is

ISBN: 972-8939-00-0 © 2005 IADIS

AN EMAIL BASED ISSUE- TRACKING WORKFLOW SYSTEM THAT IS EXTENSIBLE ACROSS ORGANIZATIONAL BOUNDARIES Z.N. Kwinana Department of Computer Science Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

P. Wentworth Department of Computer Science Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

A. Terzoli Department of Computer Science Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

ABSTRACT There is a demand for improved communication and efficiency within the work place. As emails are generally used more than issue tracking systems, this paper will investigate a way of integrating the main features of email with those of an issue tracking system to ensure tasks are completed and if not information is provided to the relevant people at the relevant times. This will be done by creating an issue in an issue tracking system that is linkable to an email so as to track tasks that need to be done and follow the task through until completion. KEYWORDS issue tracking systems, email, task management

1. INTRODUCTION Organizational Semiotics (OS) is seen as a discipline that enables us to understand the inter-working and interactions between individuals and within the society, between human and technology [5]. “OS opens up the prospect of theory-building and the development of new methods and techniques to gain insights into organised behaviour and enacted social practices, in the presence and absence of various technologies.” [11] It opens up ways of understanding the functioning of information and information resources in organised behaviour. “The Activity Theory is a philosophical and interdisciplinary framework ‘for studying different forms of human practices as development processes, with both individual and social levels interlinked at the same time’ [9], the key ideas of which include studying human activity.” [8]. If these could be analysed and understood more clearly and improved, individuals and organisations would benefit. “An increasing body of literature points to the importance of email as a task management resource. Mackay detailed how it supports a variety of time and task management activities. Whittaker and Sidner extended Mackay’s findings to show how the email inbox is a repository of “to-dos”, “to-reads” items of “indeterminate status” and “ongoing correspondence” that can be difficult to deal with. More recently, we discussed how email is transforming into a “habitat”, the central place from which work is received, managed, and delegated in organizations” [20] If “intelligent emails” were a reality, they would know their content and what to do when they contain particular content. So when one individual requests a task from another individual, with the aid of the email,

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members or automatic agents of an organisation could make sure that the task has been completed. If it has not, the email could assist and find the reason, inform the sender and remind the receiver after a particular time has gone by about the outstanding task. This would be in essence an email-based issue tracking system without the explicit overhead of using current issue tracking systems on the market. The system will integrate the stateless emails with the state-full tasks in an issue tracking system to come up with a system that takes the best of both and puts them together. The rest of the paper is structured as following: • Discussion on the available issue tracking system as well as a literature review of what has been done in this field and by whom • Our proposed system explains how everything is going to be set up and how everything works • Evaluation explains what has been done so far and what the results have been and what is to be done in the future to add more to the research as well correct a few mistakes • Conclusion concludes the paper

2. ISSUE TRACKING SYSTEMS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE This is an issue tracking system unlike the ones available on the market. A large number of the issue tracking systems available are web-based application that are used in projects for communicating as well as sharing files and other resources [1][2][3]. These systems tend to be out of scope for the proposed issue tracking system, which falls more in the direction of groupware. “Groupware is technology designed to facilitate the work of groups. This technology may be used to communicate, cooperate, coordinate, solve problems, compete, or negotiate” [10], an example of which keep track of requested tasks within a group of people [4]. The above mentioned systems have disadvantages for example exclusion from the rest of the organization if you are not explicitly signed-up to use it, inability to use across organizational boundaries, inconvenience compared to email and having to use the application in a “foreign environment” outside emails. There has been research towards task management in email. The researchers from the Palo Alto Research Centre came up with Taskmaster because they agreed with Whittacker and Sidner that email inboxes were a repository for “to do lists”, to read items, items of indeterminate status and ongoing correspondence. Taskmaster is a redesign of e-mail’s user experience without changing its fundamental technical infrastructure [15]. Taskmaster is based on the basis that the task, and not the message, is the main element of interest and thus introduces thrasks that are collections of messages. The main distinction from other work is that thrasks correspond not only to message threads, but also to collections of messages related to meaningful user activities. Thrasks are created semi-automatically. Taskmaster groups all related messages together as threads and groups emails from the inbox and outbox together because, due to their findings, when managing a task, it is just as important to keep track of the email messages one sends out. The Taskmaster interface provides ways to track and prioritise different tasks. Taskmaster is implemented in Visual Basic as an add-on to an Outlook client configured for the Exchange Mail Server [15]. HP developed the Personal Email Assistant (PEA) that provides a customisable, machine learning-based environment to support the processing of emails. A PEA is an application or suite of applications that proactively monitor and manage a user’s email. The system has been designed to be usable either with or without an agent-based infrastructure and to be useful with a variety of email systems. PEA leverages and augments the capabilities provided by Exchange and Outlook. It provides capabilities for smart vacation responder, junk mail filter, efficient email indexing and searching, deleting, forwarding, refilling and prioritising of email [16]. A threaded email client was built by [17] that seems to be a combination of Taskmaster and PEA. The prototype could help people process a very large amount of unread messages. The prototype’s thread list is categorized by days. The prototype grouped emails that referred to one idea together and thus it makes referring back simple. TimeStore, a novel, time-based email interface proposed and developed by Baecker, is an example of the first approach of using message arrival timeline. Messages are automatically organized by time and by sender on a two-dimensional grid. The two-dimensional representation allows locating messages by using when the message was received and who sent it. The second type of timeline, the temporal reference of messages, is used to facilitate the management of pending tasks embedded in messages in TimeStore.

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Task View is a follow up prototype to TimeStore. Task View focuses on how to support management of pending tasks in email and explores alternative solutions that use different external representations of messages and associated tasks [18]. “The TaskView interface was designed based on earlier results obtained with TimeStore, and through informal iterative design with rapid prototyping and user testing of preliminary versions of the TaskView interface”[13]. In TaskView, small icons on a two-dimensional grid represent tasks embedded in messages with temporal and other task information shown on the horizontal and vertical axis respectively. Other task attributes include sender, subject, or keyword extracted from the message body (user selectable). Navigation back and forward in time is provided. The display time period can be between one day and one year [13]. Request v3 is a task management tool that provides a selection of user interfaces, support for multiple database back-ends, flexible security controls, and extensive reporting capabilities. It tracks tasks for administrators, provides information about the task to the users, supports the existing environment, works with the existing systems, and makes it easier for administrators to perform their jobs without adding to existing burdens [14]. A system was developed by [13], which was a new type of email representation that makes pending tasks more visible and thus helps in task management. They felt that most email clients employed the messaging metaphor that was not designed for task management, and that does not support users in performing tasks in emails. Other systems include the Object Lens System, which was the first system to allow users to filter their email. The Coordinator System required senders to classify messages they sent in terms of a number of “speech acts” in an attempt to increase meaningfulness of email messages [12]. “A lot of other people made their contributions to email research some of them being: • Mackay who was one of the first researchers to observe that email is much more than a communication system, supporting time and task management • Whittaker and Sidner describe the role that email plays as a coordinating and collaborating tool in an organization and the problems that arise from trying to organize large quantity of incoming messages in a messaging system • Bellotti and Smith observed the central role that email plays in personal information management, with users appropriating features of their tools to create embedded mechanisms to manage complexity • Segal and Kephart suggested that automatic filters should not be applied at receipt but as an option after reading • Mintzberg has written extensively on the subject of the nature of managerial work and the structure of organizations. His work lends support to some of the hypothesis we have proposed about differences in observed patterns of email use between managers and other workers and between organizations [20]. All these systems have one thing in common, they all feel that organisation of emails will go a long way in ensuring tasks are completed in due time. It is necessary to have order with your emails, but that takes a lot of practice and discipline and as a result a lot of people do not do that. People find it difficult to copy emails to folders or put up flags for particular messages. Some people go as far as email themselves emails so that they can act as reminders of pending tasks or as document stores. Even tough they keep email messages in an attempt to remind themselves of pending tasks, it is very easy to still forget about a task. Our system promises to be different, the emails are in your face when you need to act on them and will not get lost in many screen views of email messages. “Malone argued that office desks are organised to remind people about pending tasks. Spatial arrangement is used to represent activities, their priorities, temporal dependencies and relationships among multiple tasks. Management of everyday activities relies heavily on such spatial placement and manipulation of physical objects”[12]. The same user habits can be brought to bear on the management of pending tasks in emails. Once a new message has been read, the email user is expected to perform an immediate action which can be one or a combination of: 1) respond to the message 2) delete the message or 3) file it. If the task is for a future event then it can be easy to forget about it [13]. This is why it becomes necessary to have email messages that are “in your face” when they need to be attended to and thus our system, with reminders and follow-ups until the task is completed.

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3. PROPOSED SYSTEM The proposed system will emphasise the use of existing high-level components and services, so that the key activity in the development will centre on assembling and tying together existing components, rather than building them from the ground. What is proposed is marking an email that is to be associated with a trackable issue in a tracking system. In our prototype we put the word “track:” in the subject of the email. This email will be intercepted just after it has been sent but before it has been delivered. The associated issue will be created on behalf of the sender, and the email will be annotated with explicit issue-tracking reference URLs before it is sent to the recipient. The subject of the email will be appended with a reference number to be used in follow up emails about the issue so that there is no repetition in adding the issue to the system. The back-end tracking system will take over, overseeing to the issues ensuring that they are completed. When the email arrives at the recipient, and she sees that she needs to perform a particular task, she will either go about doing the task or something will cause the task to not be done immediately. If the task can be attended to immediately and completed, then the receiver of the email will click the link for closing the issue. This will also send an email to the sender to inform him that the task he requested has been completed. If however the receiver cannot attend to the task, then they will click the corresponding link that will open a web page. On the web page will be the details of the issue. The receiver can then add a note stating why the task could not be accomplished and also set a reminder for when a reminder email should be sent to her so that she can do the task. The sender of the email will also be updated with an automatically generated email about the delay. After a particular time, the receiver of the email will get a reminder about the outstanding task. The sender of the email will also receive an email informing him that the receiver has been reminded about a particular task. The receiver will then go and perform the task. After she has accomplished the task then she will click the link for closing the task. When the issue is closed then the originator of the email will also be sent an email. This system initially will track simple one-step workflows, e.g. an email to the secretary saying “Please book a hire car…” can simply become an issue in the system, and the secretary can click on a “Completed” link in the mail to show that the item has been done. Figure 1 below shows the architecture of the system as interception occurs at the mail server.

Sender

Mail server

Receiver

Issue tracking system

Proposed system Figure 1. Architecture of the email-based issue tracking system

“In recent years, organisations have deployed workflow management systems (WFMS) to support routing of documents and tasks in electronic form, thereby enabling the automation of business processes across teams, functional departments, customers and suppliers” [12]. WFMS can be classified on a number of different criteria. A common scheme is to divide them according to their transaction throughout capacity and the latitude they allow users in the choice of processing steps [12]: • Production WFS enforce rigid control and are designed for heavy transaction processing, and strict routing rules • Administrative WFS help automate less intrusive, less complex, and often more scattered occurring processes for tasks such as expense form processing

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Ad hoc WFS support the definition of new, unanticipated workflows such as those needed to support collaborative work. They are often implemented as enhancements to basic email transport mechanisms and they are often used to support information distribution. In a second phase the system will be extended to manage multi-step workflows where, for example, a document may need to move from one person to another. This will be useful when a document or process needs the approval or input of many individuals and thus will make it easy to see who has the document at any given time. The email will still be tagged but this time with other text for example “progress report”. A supervisor will send a trackable email to the student stating that he needs a progress report. The student will prepare the progress report and then send an email to the supervisor with the document attached. This update will be made to the issue tracking system due to the fact that the trackable email has a reference number appended to the subject of the email so that an issue is properly referenced and updated. The supervisor might be unhappy with the student’s effort and thus make changes to the document and send it back to the student. The issue tracker, because of the reference number that is appended to the e-mail’s subject, will save the contents of the email. The student will make the corrections and send them back to the supervisor. The tracking here comes into play when the student or supervisor does not reply or do his bit at a proper time. A reminder will get sent to the both of them if the issue has been open for too long. When the supervisor is happy with the report, he will send an email that says so in the subject of the email and this will cause an automatic email to be sent to the next person on the list of reviewers of the progress report, that is the Head of Department (HOD). The HOD will use the system similarly as the supervisor if he is unhappy with the progress report. When he is satisfied with the report he will send an email to the supervisor that he is satisfied and again tag the subject of the email with relevant text. This will cause an automatically generated email to be sent to the next person on the list of reviewers. This can carry on as long as it is necessary in order for the report to be properly reviewed. This will ensure that the necessary people do not forget this task. A supervisor (or student) can even use this part of the system when they are submitting a performance evaluation for the student (or supervisor). With the information in the tracking system, evidence is available to show who has not been performing. •

Figure 2. Mail Transfer Agent properties

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A prototype is being built in order to see if the proposed system is viable. Firstly a mail server was set up with a few accounts. This is the MailEnable Mail Server Standard Version [6]. The mail server has a functionality called the mail transfer agent (MTA), which can be used to access an email before it is delivered to the individual mailboxes [7] so that email can be linked to issues in the issue tracking system. Figure 2 shows how we configure the MTA so that just after the email has been sent but before it arrives at its destination, it should be intercepted and a program runs to collect the relevant information from the email and save it to the issue tracker. At present the system can create an issue in the issue tracking system of an email when an email is marked for tracking. When the task is completed, the issue tracking system is updated and the issue closed. If the issue is incomplete, then the receiver informs the issue tracking system of the reason why it is incomplete and sets a time for a reminder email to be sent. The reminder email is sent after the specified time has passed. It became apparent that we could not force people to change their email configurations so as to use this particular email-based issue tracker where interception occurred at the mail server. Another version of interception was developed that was client based. The Outlook add-in was developed so that it can access the emails just after they were sent but before they have arrived. Microsoft has a history of exposing an application's functionality to external programs. They introduced a technology called COM add-ins in Office 2000. If you are building an application that requires the functionality supplied by Microsoft Outlook 2003, you can leverage the associated object model. Add-ins can be built using any COM-compliant programming tool. COM add-ins are compatible across all Microsoft Office products. With the use of a COM add-in, it is possible to access an email just as it is sent [19]. The email is accessed on the client side and the tagged email intercepted. The add-in that has been developed is suitable for Microsoft Outlook 2003. Once the email has been tagged, the issue tracking system will take over as explained above. This ensures that the final system is extensible across organisational boundaries.

4. EVALUATION Many other workflows will be added to the system and more complex ones that really test the viability of the system. Currently the prototype is in its final stages of being built and is also being tested for any unforeseen bugs. After it is tested then it will be released into the department so that many people can use and evaluate it in order to help correct a few mistakes if any. The system is very reliable and is working as imagined for the completed features. It is intuitive and thus does not need any intensive tutoring for the individuals that will be using it. The system has been tested by the developer and has kept track of many tasks as well as ensuring that the tasks are not forgotten if it is in the future by generating reminders when necessary. Expected problems with the system are the slowing down of email sending by a few seconds. This is caused by the connection to the issue tracking system and adding the issue to the database and getting back a reference number to be added to the subject of the email as well as the URL added to the email. The system is not built to be bursting with features and is thus built as a prototype to evaluate if email based issue tracking is a possible. It thus has minimal features and more features can be added at a later stage when the research has been concluded successfully.

5. CONCLUSION “Organisations and the people who work within these organisations are all self-organising systems, continually adjusting in order to survive in their worlds.” [8]. When the prototype is built and completed then it will be another step towards helping communication, collaboration and cooperation between individuals and the tasks that need to be accomplished.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was undertaken in the Distributed Multimedia CoE at Rhodes University (2004), with financial support from Telkom, the Business Connexion, THRIP and the Andrew Mellon Foundation

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