A BPM-Systems Architecture That Supports Dynamic and Collaborative Processes

INTRODUCTION Lately, Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) receive much attention from practitioners and scholars alike. Software vendors use the fuzz and provide new labels on new and existing software products; IT-consultancy companies increase their services with BPM and SOA consultancy and implementation. BPM and SOA are considered as promising IS/IT strategies. From the eighties and nineties, we identify two major business trends that seem to relate to BPM: Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) (Deming 1982, Hammer and Champy 1993). In the same period there was a rise in the implementation and use of new types of information systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Workflow Management (WFM) systems, advanced planning systems and more. What started as the automation of a company's internal processes soon focused on digitization of supply chains (Davis and Spekman 2003). Among others the Internet and associated network standardization made this possible. Since the year 2000 all these trends seem to converge into new types of information systems, that some (Smith & Fingar, 2003) call Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). A BPMS can be defined as "a generic software system that is driven by explicit process designs to enact and manage operational business processes" (Weske et al., 2004). While Aalst et al. (2003) find that Business Process Management includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of business processes. In this way it can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WfM) systems and approaches. In these definitions BPM clearly is based on the industrial-based view of the economy in which activities and processes are clearly defined and standardized as much as possible. Based on the current status of many BPMSs it is possible to conclude that a BPMS solution needs to be able to analyse and model processes within and across organizational boundaries, execute the modelled processes, measure their performance and use this as an input to optimization. This in essence means that support of processes by a BPMS starts in designtime. However in the past century, there has been a shift from the agricultural- and industrial- based economy to a more service- and knowledge-based economy (Takala, Suwansaranyu & Phusavat, 2006). This has led to a dramatically increase of the proportion of knowledge workers in the workforce. The first author who refers to the term knowledge workers is Drucker (1959). He defined knowledge workers as "workers that work with intangible resources". Besides the definition of Drucker, there are more authors that refer to knowledge workers. An example is the definition of Bennet (2003): "knowledge workers are individuals whose work effort is centered around creating, using, sharing and applying knowledge". In 1994 Drucker rephrased his definition of knowledge workers as: "high level employees who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal education, to developing new products or services". In other words, knowledge work is human mental work performed to generate useful information and knowledge (Davis, 2002). Based on the above it can be stated that the nature of knowledge work is more complex than the type of work that was typical to the industrial age and therefore also more difficult to manage and control. Although knowledge work has been an important topic in both practice and science many organizations are still focusing on creating more efficient business processes by trying to automate tasks, activities and processes with BPM-systems based on the old paradigm. However as Fingar (2006) stated: "Processes don't do work, people do". Today the missing link in many process improvement initiatives is more attention for the role of knowledge workers within processes, resulting in a task-technology misfit (Goodhue & Thompson, 1995). …