Business Process Management in the Large

Excerpt

In recent years Business Process Management (BPM) has attracted considerable attention, both in academia and practice. A growing research community is designing and investigating BPM approaches and techniques which are meanwhile widely used in private and public organizations. The quantity and quality of literature concerning BPM, the existence of specialized conferences (e.g., the International BPM Conference) as well as dedicated journals (e.g., the Business Process Management Journal) illustrate that BPM has become an established discipline. Despite the growing maturity of the BPM discipline, many approaches have problems dealing with the challenges posed by real-life BPM applications. Corporate reality is often more challenging than assumed by contemporary BPM approaches. This situation is similar to the situation of modeling enterprise data (Scheer and Hars 1992). Common enterprise-wide data models tend to be complex, difficult to maintain, and mostly lack in supporting flexible and decentralized organizational structures. In order to be able to maintain the different subareas of an enterprise-wide data model and to reduce the maintenance complexity, adequate abstraction concepts are needed. The same applies to BPM which also requires adequate abstraction concepts to handle real-life complexity. Large organizations have hundreds of different processes in place. Well-established reference process models, such as Scheer’s Reference Model for Industrial Enterprises (Scheer 1994) as well as the SAP reference model, are often disconnected from reality; real-life companies’ actual business processes are often poorly documented and relationships between different process types are not clearly denoted (Mendling et al. 2008). While conventional BPM research often seems to concentrate on single processes or scenarios comprising a few isolated processes, the upcoming challenge for BPM is to cope with large sets of interdependent inter-organizational processes in our globalized and interconnected world. This situation mainly originates from the possibilities created by technical innovations enabling ubiquitous computing, such as smart mobile devices, sensor technologies, or RFID. However, these possibilities also result in increasing complexity and dynamicity of business processes. Since existing BPM techniques and tools cannot handle this well, current research activities focus on new approaches for Business Process Management in the Large (BPM-in-the-Large). …