Nuno Castela

Collaborative maintenance of business process models

Enterprise modelling helps improving individual and organisational self-awareness by allowing sharing knowledge about the organisation among its human actors through graphical representations. In order to achieve this goal, enterprise models must not only offer a trustworthy and reliable representation of different enterprise concerns, but such representation must be up-to-date. The work presented in this paper defines a collaborative ‘as-is’ business process model updating process that uses the annotation mechanism to create interaction contexts and enable business actors to communicate their knowledge about organisational processes turning it explicit and to discuss existing process representations in order to update them. The proposed approach allows actors to act as active updaters and modellers of the as-is business process model by comparing modelled with actually executed activities. The benefits of this approach have been gathered through several case studies in real organisational environment where a collaborative enterprise modelling tool was deployed to support the defined process.

PROASIS: As-Is Business Process Model Maintenance

Business process modeling must offer a trustworthy, reliable and updated representation of different enterprise concerns. Nonetheless, it is acknowledged that model maintenance is a difficult task and most of the times modeling efforts in companies are limited to specific projects occurring at a particular time. After that, models just “sit on the shelf”. This paper defines an “as-is” model continuous updating process that uses the annotation mechanism to create interaction contexts enabling business actors (1) to communicate and explicit their knowledge about processes and about their own work, and (2) to discuss existing process representations. To support the as-is model updating process in real organizational environment a prototype tool has been developed. This approach has demonstrated that organizational actors, since provided with a process and supporting tool, can act as active updaters of business process models by comparing the modeled with actually executed activities, becoming themselves organizational modelers.

MAPA: Monitoring and Annotation of Processes and Activities

The as-is business process model represents the operational view of the organizations. Its creation effort is associated with several business activities such as (1) requirements gathering to build information systems, (2) implementing quality management systems, (3) re-engineering activities and the improvement of business processes. However, even recognizing its importance in supporting these business activities, the business process model is normally discarded after being used because it is not updated and does not follow the dynamics of organizational change. This paper describes the development of a tool that aims to implement the as-is business process model dynamic update process. The tool recognizes all organizational actors as key agents to reduce the gap between the executed processes and its representation. The tool was tested in a governmental organization where the organizational actors have detected several misalignments between the modeled activities and the real ongoing activities, which after been discussed were turned into corrections to the distributed model.

Business Process Model Dynamic Updating

Enterprise representations can be used to improve the organizational self-awareness, allowing the communication of knowledge about these concerns among different organizational actors. In order to achieve this goal, the model must provide an updated, trustworthy and reliable representation. However, the typical usage of the enterprise model is restricted to support some organizational activities for limited time intervals. The recognized difficulty in maintaining it updated and aligned with the reality has prevented the usage of enterprise models as a repository of the organizational knowledge relevant for the daily activities execution. The present work proposes a process for continuously update the enterprise model trough the annotation mechanism. Annotations enable interaction contexts that allow actors to make explicit their knowledge about their activities through graphic representations. In this process, actors act as active updaters of the as-is model, through the comparison between the modeled activities and the ongoing real executed activities. This process is modeled by DEMO methodology in order to depict the essential transactions between actors of operational and model updating processes.