Real support for perspective-compliant business process design

Abstract

Business process models aim on helping users with understanding and effectively executing business processes. Therefore, the designer of a process model should reflect the individual views of users on the process when creating the model. This paper describes a framework to assist process model designers in creating such perspective-compliant models. The framework extends an existing, recommendation-based process modeling support system by distinguishing three modeling perspectives: (1) the modeling purpose (e.g. documentation or execution), (2) the view on the process (e.g. costumer or vendor), and (3) the role in the process execution (e.g. technical support or management level). By classifying process models in this way, designers who create models for the same purpose can later-on better find and re-use relevant fragments of already existing models. To eliminate unwanted parts of relevant models, the framework uses process configuration, a method to easily restrict the behavior depicted in a process model. In this way, the modeling challenges for process designers are reduced and thus the creation of models more consistent with the needs of individual users is simplified. Early evaluations indicate the effectiveness of our approach, which goes beyond conventional modeling support for business processes. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.