Christian Stary

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.

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.

Non-disruptive knowledge and business processing in knowledge life cycles – aligning value network analysis to process management

Purpose – This paper aims to achieve fully intertwined knowledge and business processing in change processes. It proposes streamlining situated articulation work, value network analyses (VNA) and subject-oriented business process modelling (S-BPM) and execution to provide non-disruptive single and double learning processes driven by concerned stakeholders. When implementing knowledge life cycles, such as Firestone and McElroy’s knowledge life cycle, the agility of organizations is significantly constrained, in particular, when surviving knowledge claims should be implemented in the business processing environment in a seamless way. Design/methodology/approach – The contribution is based on a conceptual analysis of knowledge life cycle implementations, learning loop developments and an exploratory case study in health care to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The solution towards non-disruptive knowledge and business processing allows stakeholders to actively participate in single- an...

IDATG: an open tool for automated testing of interactive software

The IDATG (Integrating Design and Automated Test Case Generation) specification technique and tool is introduced. It is designed for the automated generation of test cases during the testing of interactive industrial applications. In addition to checking the applications usability, IDATG supports both the specification of the behavior of a user interface and the generation of two types of test case i.e. for GUI coverage and for checking the usability of the application. The test procedure for both cases is based on a particular test process model and on a formal language for representing the user interface. The tool architecture comprises a set of visual editors, a language interpreter and a test case generator. The interface concept on which the components are based enables the tool to be integrated into industrial platforms for defining and executing test cases. A first cost/benefit analysis indicates a significant reduction of effort for test case specification and test result analysis.

Tabletop concept mapping

Concept mapping is designed to externalize and represent knowledge. Together with their visual presentation concept maps should support focused and sustainable interaction between students and coaches or members of organizations. Hence, corresponding tool support has not only to empower persons externalizing their mental models but also to enable transparent multi-party interaction based on context-sensitive (re)presentations. We introduce the Tabletop Concept Mapping (TCM) technique and tool which is supposed to meet these requirements. Providing an open space to express individual thoughts and ideas, it maximizes openness with respect to pragmatics, semantics and syntax of modeling, and minimizes intervention through feature-inherent properties of the artifact.

Facilitating shared understanding of work situations using a tangible tabletop interface

As work is an inherently cooperative phenomenon, it requires a common understanding of the nature of collaboration for all involved parties. In this way, explicit articulation work becomes an integral and essential part of collaboration. Implicit aspects of collaboration have impact on the quality of work results, mainly through social norms and observations of working together. Eliciting those aspects interactively helps in avoiding (mutual) misrepresentations and lack of understanding. Tangible articulation support systems allow aligning mental models of how work should be carried out. Stakeholders can develop a common understanding of collaboration in a semantically open and non-intrusive way. They are not burdened by explication features and diagrammatic notations. We have utilised experiences with model-centred learning theory to support explicit articulation work. According to our field studies, the resulting models can be fed back to current work practices and help in preventing problematic work situations.

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.

Implementing organisational interoperability—The SUddEN approach

Dynamic markets require enterprises to collaborate in organisational networks. Current support for automotive supply networks is limited to logistic aspects. In the European project SUddEN an approach to support coordination and organisational interoperability in supply networks is researched. These networks are seen as complex adaptive systems, with their structure changing permanently and dynamically. This has impact on the flow of materials and information across the network. Coordination and interoperability are important aspects that enable the required business performance in order to survive in todays global competing business environment. The SUddEN ICT approach supports collaborative performance measurement system development. This allows network partners to adapt their individual processes to improve organisational interoperability. For this approach, an architecture has been designed and a prototype has been implemented.