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.

The Subject-Oriented Approach to Software Design and the Abstract State Machines Method

“…In fact the ASM method is introduced in [27, p.1] by stating that 'The method bridges the gap between the human understanding and formulation of real-world problems and the deployment of their algorithmic solutions by code-executing machines on changing platforms. ' Similarly, a recent presentation of the S-BPM approach states for the 'transformation process of model descriptions to executable ones' [34,Sect.2, that:…”

Managing Complexity in Activity Specifications by Separation of Concerns and Reusability

“…These models specify how they react on messages and under which condition subjects send messages. We will recall an example from [18]. It is based on the following natural language description: "An employee fills in a holiday application form.…”

An Abstract State Machine Interpreter for S-BPM

“…Activities are denoted by predicates, and an object is the target of an activity. As in a natural language with subjectpredicate-object (Fleischmann and Stary 2012), the object is the target of an activity and is not mandatory. Objects denoted as business objects can be manipulated in the course of the internal action or can be sent from one subject to another subject.…”