Whom to talk to? A stakeholder perspective on business process development

Abstract

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. © 2011 The Author(s).