Controlled Flexibility and Lifecycle Management of Business Processes through Extensibility

Companies employ business process management suites to model, run, and maintain their processes. These processes are required to comply with requirements originating from standards or policies and follow industry best practices. At the same time, business processes must be sufficiently flexible to incorporate company-specific customizations. This paper introduces extensibility as a new process flexibility approach. Extensibility addresses the issue of customizing reference processes. Reference processes are “shipped content” which is maintained by the BPMS vendor, keeping the total cost of ownership (TCO) down at the customer side. At the same time, customers may flexibly define process extensions as “deltas” on top of reference processes. Extensibility is for the most part motivated through shortcomings of other process flexibility techniques with respect to a separation of (maintenance) concerns, and excessive upgrade costs in large-scale software rollouts. With process...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EMISA
• Authors: Sören Balko, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Alistair P. Barros, Marcello La Rosa
• Keywords: EMISA 2009, Extensibility, Information Management, Process flexibility, Reference Processes