BPM-in-the-Large – Towards a Higher Level of Abstraction in Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) has gained tremendous importance in recent years and BPM technologies and techniques are widely applied in practice. Furthermore there is a growing and very active research community looking at process modeling and analysis, reference models, workflow flexibility, process mining and process-centric Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, it is clear that existing approaches have problems dealing with the enormous challenges real-life BPM projects are facing. Large organizations have hundreds of processes in place. These processes are often poorly documented and the relationships between them are not made explicit. Conventional BPM research seems to focus on situations with just a few isolated processes while in reality the real challenge is to cope with large collections of interconnected processes. Moreover, new technologies such as ubiquitous computing (sensor technologies, mobile devices, RFID tagging etc.) and pervasive networks (cf. “internet of things”) generate enor mous volumes of event data. Organizations have problems handling and using such data. Event data is scattered over various subsystems and not used well. This paper coins the term “BPM-in-the-Large” to describe the above situation and describes challenges and opportunities for BPM research.