Business Process Variability and Public Values

Abstract

A business process is a structure of inter-related activities that are executed in order to achieve a specific business objective. Organizations often maintain multiple variants of a given business process because of changing conditions, different regulations in different countries, or other contextual factors. We aim at specifying the relationship between a generic business process and its different variants, taking the perspective of public values, such as privacy, accountability, and transparency. The business process variants in turn may be a basis for software specifications – in this, business processes would be bridging between societal demands (possibly concerning public values) and the corresponding technical (software) functionalities. Our contribution is featuring a meta-model that describes business processes on a value-independent level; they can be extended towards value-specific business process variants that can be related in turn to software architectures. We reflect this in proposed value operationalization guidelines, using concepts from business process design as a basis; those guidelines assume coming firstly through technology-independent artefacts and secondly – through technology-specific artefacts, to arrive at software specifications that are adequate with regard to public-values-related demands.