External and internal factors force companies to be flexible in their business processes. However, the information systems used in the companies are often too complex and the implemented process models are too rigid to quickly adopt changing determining conditions. This leads to a loss of eficiency since various tasks that would be suitable for the execution by workflow management systems must be performed manually. The presented approach for a solution solves this problem by ofering a method to exploit the automation potential by using suitable flexible tools and a target-group oriented procedure model. Compared to existing approaches this method does not try to solve the problem on a company level. Instead the focus is on the individual employee who will be enabled to improve his personal workflows.
Jonas Lehner
Process models are often developed by top management and are imposed on
employees (top-down). Usually this is performed by a process modelling specialist
who is not equipped with the necessary domain knowledge. This may lead to a
situation where the employee is faced with a process model that does not represent
his actual needs and therefore does not support him in his daily business. In the
worst case it will even constrain him in the fulfilment of his duties. Bandera et al.
identify the “perceived gaps between process design and process execution” as one
of the top operational issues in BPM [
Companies have to deal with internal and external drivers and need to
be flexible in their business processes which may lead to a problem since the
information systems used in the companies cannot respond quickly to changing
conditions. Hence, optimization potential is not used because employees have to
perform tasks manually instead of using a workflow management system. Indulska
et. al see problems with change management and a lack of governance [
Personal BPM tries to address these problems by providing a user centred perspective on business process management and the execution of workflows. In this context, the user is understood to be any member of an organization, who is not inevitably a modelling expert. He has to have a certain level of understanding regarding the use of IT. To benefit from the automation, a substantial part of his work should be done on a computer. Examples for users in this context are agents in an insurance or scientific researchers in a university.
Following the BPM lifecycle (often described, e. g., [
Business process management is widely used by companies. But as shown before its benefits does not always reach the operational level and therefore the single employee, which leads to the following main research question: RQ0 How can the benefits of using BPM be transferred to the operating range of individual members of an organization? This main research question can be divided into four questions concerning diferent aspect: RQ1 What language is suitable for modelling business processes in this context? Business processes are usually modelled using graphical languages like BPMN, EPC or Petri nets. This is suitable for modelling specialists, while domain specialists may have problems in understanding and using it.
RQ2 How does a workflow management system have to be like that is flexible enough to be used by domain specialists? Workflow management systems are complex software systems that are usually configured by IT experts and cannot be easily customized by the end user. RQ3 How can the development process for new features be supported? A system that has to meet the requirements of the users has to be expandable in its functions. Hence, developers of additional features have to be encouraged by the architecture of the system.
RQ4 How is the productivity of individual employees afected by the deployment of Personal BPM? If using a software system takes more time than doing something manually it should not be utilized. Therefore an evaluation has to be performed to show if it is useful to use Personal BPM in daily business.
Business processes as an ordered set of activities to achieve a specific
operational objective can be modelled with diferent languages, e. g., BPMN, UML and
Petri nets. XML nets represent a variant of higher Petri nets, which can model
business processes based on the exchange of relevant information objects [
The idea of using Petri nets to describe runnable workflows is often described
(e. g., [
One approach to close the gap between modelling specialists and domain
experts is described by Luebbe and Weske [
Petric and van der Aalst present an approach for flexible business process
management that addresses the problem of managing dynamic processes in
rapidly changing organizations by shifting from an imperative paradigm to a
declarative one [
In contrast, there are a couple of services, that use some kind of personal workflows like IFTTT (http://ifttt.com) or the mobile app “workflow” (http://workflow.is). They allow users to manage diferent social media services and connect them with simple rules, e. g., save a photo in dropbox, that a user posted on facebook or change the colour of a smart home light bulb when a new email is received. But these services are not suitable for a business context since they only allow simple linear processes and support a closed set of services.
There is a common approach that uses personal task management to enable
end-user driven business process composition [