Fresh Approaches to Business Process Modeling (Dagstuhl Seminar 16191)

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) has significantly advanced and gained high popularity in industry. However, it remains an open issue why tools frequently are used for business process modeling that are not mainly implemented for this purpose. Often, macros for Microsoft Visio or Microsoft Excel form the first choice to capture the flow of business activities. One reason why these tools might be used is the low training effort and the fast creation of a quick model, which can be generated with these tools. Another reason for the “lower” preference of BPM software tools might be their inability to respond to changes in technology and working styles, e.g. the shift towards "agile" processes and the "flattening" of workforce hierarchies that bring more stakeholders into contact with a much broader array of processing steps than before.

A central question is whether the BPM community should create an entirely new paradigm for process modeling. One can think of more intuitive drawing conventions that laymen would use, and of models of an entirely different kind (i.e. not process-centric and not data- or case-centric) that still bear the possibility to support modern and future business process.

The purpose of this seminar was to bring together a cross-disciplinary group of academic and industrial researchers to foster a better understanding of how to ease the access to, and applicability of, business process modeling. We discussed business process modeling approaches against emerging trends such as Internet of Things, the need for incremental and agile creation of new processes, and the need for workers to understand and participate in multiple contextual levels (e.g. transactional, business goals, strategic directions) while performing processes. The seminar also considered how new technologies, such as modern tools for UI design (e.g. D3, node.js) could be applied to support fundamentally shifts in how processes are modeled and how humans are involved with their execution.