An Agile BPM System for Knowledge-Based Service Organizations

This paper presents a business process management (BPM) system aimed at knowledge-based service organizations. The core activity of these organizations consists on the delivery of high-valued services tailored to each customer. When compared to product-based organizations, service organizations have more dynamic and diversified business portfolios and business processes, due to the need to adapt to evolving customer needs. The efficiency of business process management (BPM) solutions is widely recognised as far as high volume standardized processes are concerned, but the unsuitability of these systems to handle customizable service requests is also widely acknowledged. With this in mind, a new BPM platform, hereafter referred to as the soBPM platform, was designed and deployed. This platform is intended to offer a higher degree of flexibility, both at process design-time and process run-time. The platform implements a soft-automation process management approach that will be discussed in the first part of the paper. Then, the deployment of the platform at the Shared Service Center of a large University will be presented.