Albert Fleischmann

Subject-Oriented Business Process Management

Activities performed in organizations are coordinated via communication between the people involved. The sentences used to communicate are naturally structured by subject, verb, and object. The subject describes the actor, the verb the action and the object what is affected by the action. Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) as presented in this book is based on this simple structure which enables process-oriented thinking and process modeling. S-BPM puts the subject of a process at the center of attention and thus deals with business processes and their organizational environment from a new perspective, meeting organizational requirements in a much better way than traditional approaches. Subjects represent agents of an action in a process, which can be either technical or human (e.g. a thread in an IT system or a clerk). A process structures the actions of each subject and coordinates the required communication among the subjects. S-BPM provides a coherent procedural framework to model and analyze business processes: its focus is the cooperation of all stakeholders involved in the strategic, tactical, and operational issues, sharing their knowledge in a networked structure. The authors illustrate how each modeling activity through the whole development lifecycle can be supported through the use of appropriate software tools. The presentation style focuses on professionals in industry, and on students specializing in process management or organizational modeling. Each chapter begins with a summary of key findings and is full of examples, hints, and possible pitfalls. An interpreter model, a toolbox, and a glossary summarizing the main terms complete the book. The web site www.i2pm.net provides additional software tools and further material.

What Is S-BPM?

Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) has emerged to a semantic paradigm, modeling, and implementation approach. This contribution reflects its current state of development. The review of underlying concepts and resulting benefits demonstrates the orientation towards actor responsibilities and communication transparency. The introduction of advanced modeling features reflects the capability of S-BPM to capture complex business cases while ensuring operational coherence.

Whom to talk to? A stakeholder perspective on business process development

Although many organizations operate in a process-driven way, few members are skilled in specifying and developing business processes—a skill that has become crucial for organization development, in particular to establish agile enterprises. This paper shows, on the basis of natural language constructs (subject, predicate, object) and communication patterns between actors (subjects), how individual members of an organization could contribute to coherent and intelligible process specifications. A language and tool supporting Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) are introduced, allowing organizations to cope with strategic and operational challenges dynamically. As many organizations already work with BPM concepts and technologies, existing approaches to process modelling are also revisited with respect to representing natural language constructs and standard sentence syntax. Since most of them refer either to subjects, predicates, objects or to a respective combination, a roadmap can be developed for enriching existing modelling approaches. In doing so, organizations can benefit from stakeholder inputs for effective business process engineering re-using existing specifications.

SUBJEKTORIENTIERTES PROZESSMANAGEMENT: Mitarbeiter einbinden, Motivation und Prozessakzeptanz steigern

In der Buchversion hat sich leider der Fehlerteufel eingeschlichen. Bitte verwenden Sie diese Version. We develop in this appendix a high-level subject-oriented interpreter model for the semantics of the S-BPM constructs presented in this book. To directly and faithfully reflect the basic constituents of S-BPM, namely communicating agents which can perform arbitrary actions on arbitrary objects, Abstract State Machines are used which explicitly contain these three conceptual ingredients.

Subject-Oriented Modeling and Execution of Multi-agent Business Processes

This paper addresses a gap in handling multi-agent business processes that has prevented their larger-scale adoption in practice: the lack of a conceptual modeling approach that is easily understandable by business domain experts and sufficiently formal for direct transformation into executable systems. The emerging paradigm of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM), which has been evaluated through academic research and is increasingly deployed in commercial applications, has the potential to augment multi-agent system (MAS) models with a process-centric layer that preserves autonomy and concurrent interaction of agents as essential system characteristics. In this paper we provide an aligned meta-model and illustrate its operational benefits with examples from business process applications.

Subject-Oriented BPM = Socially Executable BPM

Social BPM describes efforts in a management and technology dimension to overcome shortcomings of traditional BPM. Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) is an emerging approach focusing on adjusted interaction and individual behavior of stakeholders in business operation. This contribution reveals how S-BPM as a per se social technology incorporates both, management, and technology issues of Social BPM.

Coherent task modeling and execution based on subject-oriented representations

Process- and task-driven workflow support has become vital for enterprises as they operate in an increasingly networked business environment. Thereby business process specifications represent boundary objects not only between different organizational units, but also between technology and business operations. Process specifications need to be integrated and implemented in a flexible way for actual work-task support. Although several business process techniques and technologies are in place there are still several transformational steps to be performed when implementing business operations based on detailed work descriptions. One effective way to prevent incoherencies is role-specific and task-driven modeling, representation, and processing of business operations. The introduced approach is termed subject-oriented business process management, as it ensures coherence between modeling and execution through focusing on the communication flow among process participants (subjects) in the course of work- task accomplishment.

Leveraging CMMN for ACM: examining the applicability of a new OMG standard for adaptive case management

Adaptive case management (ACM) is an increasingly popular approach for supporting knowledge-intensive business processes. Being a new approach, it still lacks a similar degree of standardization as the more established business process management (BPM) approaches. This paper introduces the new Case Management and Model and Notation (CMMN) standard. Based on a set of ACM requirements, the applicability of CMMN for modeling ACM cases is examined thoroughly and extensions improving the ACM support of CMMN are proposed.

S-BPM in the Wild

Successful companies use business processes for the transfer of long-term strategies in operational workflows. The modeling approach presented in this chapter shows how strategic objectives of a company can be combined with the S-BPM modeling notation. The new modeling approach is used in two case studies. First, redesign rules for the strategic optimization of workflow models are demonstrated in the case of the customer support processes of an international enterprise. A second case study introduces a company-wide monitoring system through the example of the product development process of a multinational company from Germany. M. Lederer (&) P. Schott Information Systems (Services-Processes-Intelligence), University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90403 Nuremberg, Germany e-mail: matthias.lederer@fau.de P. Schott e-mail: peter.schott@fau.de M. Kurz QUA-LiS NRW, Paradieser Weg 64, 59494 Soest, Germany e-mail: Matthias.kurz@qua-lis.nrw.de

BPM 2.0: Business Process Management Meets Empowerment

Traditional approaches for business process management assume that process models remain unchanged. However, businesses today have to adapt their business process models to new market changes instantaneously. Current methods for business process management approaches and their supporting information systems turn out to be too time-consuming and costly. This contribution suggests a new business process management concept (BPM 2.0) along with a corresponding software system that increase the flexibility of businesses by allowing employees to improve ”their” business processes. A case study at a large European construction firm critically examines the feasibility both of the concept as well as the software system.