Abstract

Traditional approaches for business process management assume that process models remain unchanged. However, today, business process models of enterprises have to adapt to market changes instantaneously. Current methods for business process management and supporting information systems provide only limited support for this challenge. Therefore, changes of existing process models tend to be time-consuming and costly.

The goal of the research association ForFlex is to find ways to increase the ability of enterprises to react swiftly to changes. As part of this association, the research project Flex.Act examines ways to model business processes both centrally by a process design team as well as locally by the operational departments. This hybrid approach allows developing and improving the business processes continuously and autonomously while ensuring a central evaluation. Inspired by examples in nature, such a system is referred to as “emergent”.

Research Picture

Project Description

Motivation

Although employees from operational departments are confronted with new challenges first, these departments possess only little instruments to adapt “their” business processes as well as the underlying IT systems. Thereby, the company’s ability to respond to new challenges is limited.

The project Flex.Act has the goal to increase the flexibility of business processes by offering operational departments a substantially improved freedom for improving and adapting “their” business processes. This realizes the vision of self-organization which refers to organizations that continuously adapt themselves without any external planning.

In order to achieve that goal, a concept including both the organizational as well as the technological dimension has to be developed. Such an approach has to answer the following questions:

The project Flex.Act develops an approach that answers those questions and thereby makes self-organization available to business process management. Referring to Web 2.0 concepts that focus on integrating users in the value creation this concept is referred to as BPM 2.0.

BPM 2.0 Approach

The BPM 2.0 approach as an approach that integrates Enterprise 2.0 and self-organizations into on coherent business process management concept. The suffix “2.0” refers to the suffix of Enterprise 2.0 and indicates that BPM 2.0 relies on a tight integration of employees for the design and adaptation of business processes.

The fundamental idea of this concept is that employees identify improvement potentials during their day-to-day work and develop corresponding process improvements (so-called process innovations). A web-based platform supports employees in collaboratively coordinating cross-function work and information flows.

Contribution to flexibility: Easy-to-use software allows employees to identify new challenges early and to develop improvements on their own. By integrating all affected stakeholders from operational departments, the interface consistency between multiple business processes is ensured. Integrating members from the IT department early ensures that such improved processes can be automated with a reasonable effort. Finally, a classical release mechanism ensures that the results of this form of self-organization are accepted by the organization.

The integration of employees about planned changes reduces the resistance against the implementation of process innovations. Furthermore, the integration in the development of an implementation plan increases the probability that important barriers are identified and circumvented early.

BPM 2.0 Platform

The success of BPM 2.0 depends on contributions from the employees. These contributions are supported by a software platform that allows the collaborative design of business processes. In the following image, the Microsoft SharePoint based BPM 2.0 platform is depicted.

In order to motivate the employees to improve “their” processes, this platform is web based. For each business process, a workspace with the following instruments is offered:

The web based modeling tool allows designing business processes without requiring locally installed software.

The wiki allows complementing the process models with texts and graphics. Thereby employees can contribute domain knowledge both during the design and execution phase. That way, best practices and other forms of additional information can easily be added to the process model without requiring any modeling knowledge.

Questions, suggestions, and discussions that do not serve the process documentation directly, take place in the discussion board. Here, ideas and problems can be discussed and improvement suggestions can be refined.

A major precondition for contributions to the process workspace is the notification of the stakeholders about new contents using push messages (Email or Newsfeeds). This ensures that participants are kept up-to-date about news regarding “their” processes.

The easy-to-use workspace offers collaborative tools like Wikis and discussion boards known from other Web 2.0 applications in order to allow contributions from employees with limited methodic knowledge in business process management. With increasing expertise the mental barrier for contributions to the graphical process model will diminish over time. Once a promising improvement becomes apparent, employees can easily create a new process workspace for this new process innovation.

The planned controlling tool will be integrated in the platform as well in order to provide hints to improvement potentials on the one hand and in order to ensure that the success of process innovations can be transparently communicated. That way, employees can be motivated for the creation of new process innovation.

Contribution to flexibility: The platform allows integrating a large number of employees in the design of process innovations and therefore is an important precondition for the BPM 2.0 concept. As the web-based solution requires no local software installation and runs on all major browsers, the barrier for contributing new suggestions is substantially lowered.

Automation

Model-driven Architectures are a major instrument for reducing complexity. In this approach, domain experts without in-depth IT knowledge develop models in a problem-centric notation. These models are then enriched in multiple steps with technical details until source code fragments which have to be completed by developers are created by a code generator.

When applying this approach to business processes, employees from the operational departments create business process models from a business perspective which focuses on activities and their sequence. However, with data flow as well as its underlying data types being vital for execution, those models are not executable. On the other hand, including too much technical detail in the models representing the business perspective exceeds the capabilities of most business users.

Furthermore, the sequential approach of MDA makes feedback from business users to technical models almost impossible. The use of multiple process modeling notations (eEPC vs. BPMN vs. UML) widens this gap even further.

Therefore, a joint project between Flex.Act and SIS developed a concept as well as a prototype for extending the influence operational departments have on the design and adaptation of the IT supporting “their” business processes.

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