Informal Process Essentials

Abstract

Human-centric processes are part of most organizations and their execution steps are typically not known initially. Consequently, standard business process modeling approaches are not suitable for modeling informal processes because they typically concentrate on the explicit modeling of the execution steps. In this work, we analyze properties of informal processes and requirements for supporting their correct enactment. We review existing approaches and evaluate their suitability in terms of modeling informal processes. Based on these results, we present a resource-centric approach by employing the concept of Informal Process Essentials which is used to create executable informal process models with dynamically changing interrelated resources.

Transforming Collaboration Structures into Deployable Informal Processes

“…On the other hand, there are human-centric informal processes which cannot be well-defined using these activity-oriented approaches as their activities and sequences constantly change. Rather than using activity-oriented approaches, one captures the essential repeated information using resourcecentric approaches such as Informal Process Essentials (IPE) [30]. The desired process result may be repeatedly obtained through selection of the same set of resources (and subsequently engaging them towards the collective goals of informal processes).…”

“…5) on top of our previous work [30] in order to test and validate our approach (see screenshots in Fig. 6).…”

“…However, these approaches focus primarily on activities and not resources. To this end, we have proposed a resource-oriented approach [30]. It enables the deployment of the resources in the context of an informal process context.…”

“…Informal processes are hence inherently human-centric. Here, the traditional process modeling primitives (i.e., elements for tasks, control flow, data flow, etc) are often no longer suitable [15,30]. Other interaction dependency management patterns [17] such as Shared Artifact, Social Network, Secretary/Principal, Master/Worker, or Publish/Subscribe become increasingly relevant.…”

“…Our approach separates the specification of collaboration roles [16] from their provisioning details [30]. Along these lines, informal process participants utilize a collaboration-centric architecture description language for determining the required roles and collaboration actions for their particular informal process instance.…”