Nils Meyer

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.

ModelAsYouGo: (Re-) Design of S-BPM Process Models during Execution Time

The classic approach of a Business Process Life Cycle, where a process model will be defined, modeled, simulated, deployed and then executed to get monitored, analyzed and finally optimized to start the cycle again, often does not match the needs of new dynamic requirements on Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Practical use cases for a more dynamic BPM are emergent processes, which occur in situations, where it is necessary to react at execution time on business transactions, e.g. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) and flexible processes. Even S-BPM, an approach which enables BPM especially in processes mostly controlled by human interaction, is working with a static process model that is executable, but not changeable during execution. ModelAsYouGo shows a way to (re-) design a S-BPM process model, whose workflow is not or just partly known at modelling time, while actually executing the process. By exploiting S-BPM’s focus on interaction ModelAsYouGo allows process participants to design their process models in a collaborative manner.

Dynamic Catenation and Execution of Cross Organisational Business Processes - The jCPEX! Approach

In order to meet today’s business needs, companies using business process workflow engines not only demand to span their business processes across organizational borders but also to have the flexibility to dynamically select their partners to be able to react adequately to change.

Model as You Do: Engaging an S-BPM Vendor on Process Modelling in 3D Virtual Worlds

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time-consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Metasonic GmbH has developed a process elicitation tool for their process suite. As part of a research engagement with Metasonic, staff from QUT, Australia have developed a 3D virtual world approach to the same problem, viz. eliciting process models from stakeholders in an intuitive manner. This book chapter tells the story of how QUT staff developed a 3D Virtual World tool for process elicitation and took the outcomes of their research project to Metasonic for evaluation, and of Metasonic’s response to the initial proof of concept.

Towards a Subject-Oriented Evolutionary Business Information System

In todays rapidly changing business environment a companys business and related information systems underlie constant change. The field of evolutionary business information systems deals with applications that can be modified partially by stakeholders regarding content and behavior with the objective to align to new business requirements. A possibility to change the behavior of an application could be achieved by modification of the underlying business processes. Subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM) realizes an approach where process models can be interpreted by an appropriate workflow engine and directly executed by stakeholders using a generic application working on it. In that way the generic application can be seen as a primary system on which a secondary design can be performed by editing the process models. In this paper we compare evolutionary business information systems with subject-oriented business process management with the objective to infer software requirements for implementing an evolutionary business information system on the basis of S-BPM, where the system behavior is a result of the continuous evolution of the underlying business processes.

Generating Subject-Oriented Process Models from Ad-Hoc Interactions of Cognitive Agents

To flexibly adapt business processes to changing requirements and new opportunities, it is often necessary to allow ad-hoc deviations from pre-defined process models. Agent systems can provide the autonomous behaviour needed for engaging in new interactions that were not included in the initial process model. However, the issue arises how these ad-hoc interactions can be captured for purposes of governance and process improvement. This paper presents an approach for generating subject-oriented process models from the cognitive models used by agents while interacting. It is based on the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) model of agents and its mapping onto key concepts of subject-oriented process modelling. We illustrate the approach using a mock-up implementation.

Platform for Managing and Routing Cross-Organizational Business Processes on a Network Router

Today’s business process- and workflow management is not limited to organizational borders but relates to network structures. Customers, partners and suppliers need to be supported on the basis of coordinated value added chains. The respective workflow engines however are in most cases sealed off by a corporate network and thus not reachable from outside without further ado. In this article we will revise our jCPEX! approach for connecting inter-organizational business process and present a solution where the jCPEX! platform resolves the mentioned impediment of private networks by being provided on a network router that connects the external net with the corporate network of an organization, making a separate DMZ superfluous for this purpose.

Democratizing Business Process Management: Empowering Process Participants to Contribute to the Enactment of Business Processes

Employee empowerment, meaning among other granting employees discretion to change work processes, has been identified as mean to improve the performance of an organization. Although the involvement of business process participants has been identified as one of the key success factors for BPM projects, end users are typically not participating in the modeling process nor are they involved in the implementation of the modelled processes based on supporting IT systems. Therefore the direct influence of employees on their work processes supported by IT systems is limited. To overcome this limitation this paper presents an agile business process management approach based on a strong involvement of process participants. To foster the involvement we propose a reduced model size and complexity, the iterative enrichment of the process model with exceptional paths and the possibility to migrate process instances to newer process model versions. We show which parts of this proposal are already used today, which additional requirements exist, which available research helps to propose solutions for the open issues and which hypothesis lying beyond our proposal were planning to test.

TicTacTuned – Subject-Oriented Business Process Model Elicitation

In this paper we introduce the TicTacTuned method as S-BPM based objectives-driven, performance-oriented, way of building, validating and improving processes in organizations. The method is founded upon perpetual exchange of the context from process level to internal behavior level, and the working practice from collaborative to individual supported by automatic generation of executable process models out of internal behavior diagrams. The approach is focused on the employees with intend to raise their inspiration and motivation, to empower them to manage parts of the business processes on their own and to share the responsibility for process performance, to mitigate fear and reluctance towards change and to encourage creating and sharing of knowledge.