End-User Driven Business Process Composition

• Main Author: Stoitsev, Todor
• Format: Others
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/1417/1/tstoitsev_dissertation_final.pdf; Stoitsev, Todor <http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/view/person/Stoitsev=3ATodor=3A=3A.html> (2009): End-User Driven Business Process Composition.Darmstadt, Technische Universität, [Ph.D. Thesis]

Business Process Management (BPM) solutions enable enterprises to consolidate and optimize their business operations and to gain competitive advantage in the fast evolving global market. Often, the only ones to understand the matter and complexity of business processes are the end users of enterprise software, who execute them on a daily basis. The need to involve end users in business process composition during the implementation of BPM solutions in enterprises is clearly perceived. However, end users have a detailed domain expertise but limited technical skills. Therefore upfront process modeling through conventional modeling notations remains inaccessible for them. The need for user-centric process composition approaches arises, which can enable end users to tailor business processes according to their actual expertise and problem solving strategies. Furthermore, these approaches need to bridge the process understanding of end users and technically skilled process designers and developers in the course of workflow projects in order to facilitate the development of real-life compliant and consistent process models and to streamline the uptake of BPM software in enterprises. This thesis addresses end-user driven composition of both: (i) weakly-structured process models for supporting underspecified, human-centric business processes and (ii) structured business process models for automation of rigidly recurring processes through workflow engines. Both process types are composed through programming by example in a collaborative task management system. Task management is chosen as a starting point for end-user driven process composition in order to reconcile the personal and the enterprise perspectives on business processes. Programming by example is an end-user development technique, which enables capturing and repeated execution of user activities in a software system. The application of this technique in an enterprise scope for the composition of business process models is novel and requires specific support from user’s perspective and from formal system’s perspective. The four major scientific contributions of the thesis can be captured as: (i) a task management model for human-centric business processes; (ii) a method for composition of weakly-structured process models through collaborative task management; (iii) a method for transformation of weakly-structured process models to structured workflows and their refinement based on deviations with ad-hoc tasks at runtime; (iv) the holistic concept for end-user driven business process composition through programming by example, composing contributions (i) through (iii) into a seamless overarching method and architecture for the composition of weakly-structured and structured process models. The elaborated concepts provide a significant contribution to known process modeling approaches in various research areas such as human-computer interaction, BPM, workflow management and computer supported cooperative work. The presented concepts found on preliminary empirical studies, comprising an online questionnaire distributed to a number of companies from various industries, and a series of field studies in three German small and medium enterprises. The preliminary studies deliver strong support for end-user development in the domain of task management and identify entry points for introducing process tailoring to end users. These studies provide input for the elaborated task management model and drive the design choices for the architecture, underling the presented holistic concept. The presented concepts take into consideration existing end user work practices and software applications for management of day-to-day activities, such as email and personal to-do list applications delivered with standard office environments. The task management model enables aggregation of data from these applications for the composition of weakly-structured business process models. These models can be repeatedly adapted and reused for the execution of ad-hoc, human-centric processes. The method for generation of structured workflows from weakly-structured process models enables automation of rigidly recurring processes through workflow engines. Generated workflows can be extended by process designers and developers, in a shared context between user-defined and formal process models. The mapping of weakly-structured process models to structured workflow models facilitates data reuse between ad-hoc and operational processes. Enhanced data sharing and interoperability between ad-hoc and structured processes is enabled through the introduced holistic concept and the underlying architecture. The presented concepts have been implemented and validated through a prototype called Collaborative Task Manager. The evaluation results confirm that the proposed end-user development approach and its enterprise-wide application through the presented concepts efficiently enable end-user driven business process composition. Thus the specified task management model, methods and holistic concept can be used for designing user-tailorable BPM systems that facilitate the adoption of BPM technology in enterprises.