Mainstream business process modelling techniques often promote a design paradigm wherein the activities that may be performed within a case, together with their usual execution order, form the backbone on top of which other aspects are anchored. This Fordist paradigm, while effective in standardised and production-oriented domains, breaks when confronted with processes in which case-bycase variations and exceptions are the norm. We contend that the effective design of flexible processes calls for a substantially different modelling paradigm. Motivated by requirements from the human services domain, we explore the hypothesis that a framework consisting of a small set of coordination concepts, combined with established objectoriented modelling principles, provides a suitable foundation for designing highly flexible processes. Several human service delivery processes have been designed using this framework, and the resulting models have been used to realise a system to support these processes in a pilot environment.

Object-oriented modeling is an established approach to document information systems. In an object model, a system is captured in terms of object types and associations, state machines and collaboration diagrams, among others. Process modeling on the other hand, provides a different approach whereby behavior is captured in terms of activities, flow dependencies, resources, etc. These two approaches have their relative advantages. Also, object models and process models lend themselves to different styles of implementation. In this paper we define a transformation from a meta-model for object behavior modeling to a meta-model for process modeling. The transformation relies on the identification of causal relations in the object model. These relations are encoded in a heuristics net from which a process model is derived and then simplified. Using this transformation, it becomes possible to apply established object-oriented techniques during system analysis and design, and to transform the resulting object models into executable process models that can be deployed in a workflow engine. The proposal has been implemented in an object modeling tool.

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Mainstream business process modelling techniques promote a design paradigm wherein the activities that may be performed within a case, together with their usual execution order, form the backbone on top of which other aspects are anchored. This Fordist paradigm, while effective in standardised and production-oriented domains, breaks when confronted with processes in which case-bycase variations and exceptions are the norm. We contend that the effective design of flexible processes calls for a substantially different modelling paradigm: one where processes are organized as interacting business objects rather than as chains of activities. This paper presents a metamodel for business process modelling based on business objects. The paper also presents a real-life case study in which a number of human service delivery processes were designed using the presented meta-model. The case study demonstrates that the meta-model addresses three key flexibility requirements encountered in this domain.

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