An Architecture for End-User Driven Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) systems face the challenge of involving business users, who have a detailed domain expertise but lack advanced technical skills, in modeling and optimization of enterprise processes. The paper presents an architecture which enables people integration in BPM by interconnecting personal task lists and email of different users to a process-enabled middleware and generating weakly-structured process models from ad-hoc task hierarchies. These models can be transformed to formal workflows by implicitly involving business users in formal process modeling. The resulting workflows can be executed on a workflow engine. Through shared repositories between the ad hoc task management system and the workflow engine, the architecture facilitates their interoperability and ensures a seamless integration of user-defined to formal process definitions. The architecture is implemented in the Collaborative Task Manager (CTM) prototype. Through a CTM case study at an industrial company we show how the architecture facilitates people-focused BPM.