Business Process (BP) meta-models allow partial views of the processes. There may be adequate for some processes but not others. Situational engineering has proved its effectiveness in many engineering domains such as software and information system development. Reasoning on a situational approach for BP meta-modelling is a challenging research issue which can contribute to increase flexibility of meta-models and their adaptability to different organisation settings.
Current researches on business process (BP) modelling stress the importance of
the flexibility and the adaptability of BP [
BPs are of various kinds and are defined in different levels of abstraction using
various artifacts depending on the organisation settings and the purpose of the
modelling. For instance, in mechanistic or production organisations, they are often
prescribed in a detailed level since they shall be executed. On contrary, in adhocracies
organisation, more freedom can be left to business actors for choosing how to perform
the underlying business objectives. Therefore, the meta-models can be different and
capture only some aspects of processes, however, sometimes their interrelationships
could or should be taken into consideration and their complimentarily needs to be
expressed. That is, in some situations, activity-oriented and product-oriented ones
may need to be matched in order to determine which activity influences on which
product and on which moment of the process. Also, strategy-oriented process
metamodels require to be made operational using activity-oriented meta-models [
In the information systems development (ISD) community, method engineering
(ME) has been introduced as a response to the need for methods adapted to specific
ISD project situations, and to the failure of the methods known as "universal" [
2 Overview of the proposed approach with examples
Building the adequate meta-model can be done following several manners, for
instance, by assembling relevant concepts, by constructing a core meta-model and
enhancing it with required concepts, etc. With analogy to the method in the ISD field,
we introduce the concept of business method which consists of a set of reusable
components that we identify as BP meta-model chunks. In the remainder of the paper,
we simply denote them by BPM-chunk. BPM-chunks are independent and stored in a
chunk repository. They can be reused in order to build new meta-models or to
enhance existing ones. The can be simple (e.g. a concept) or compound (e.g. a set of
concepts, properties and relationships between them). In the reminder, we introduce
some examples of BPM-chunks that constitute a partial vision of the repository. We
underline the use of some operators for managing them. We are inspired from
operators defined in [
PM0 and PM1. PM0 (Fig. 1 (left)) keeps a minimal set of features. It may be suitable
for some organisation settings, e.g. stable organisations with minor changes and few
operations. Otherwise, defining operations in a finer granularity, and in frequently
changing organisations, may involve a cumbersome work. In such situation, PM0 can
be extended with C0 (Fig. 2) in order to construct PM1. C0 serves, in PM1, as a link
between roles and operations, BPs are relied to functions rather than operations. PM1
is discussed in detail in [
CPM0 onstraint extension C
* Belongs to *
*
Reachs 1
* * Can play * * Participates *
Can hold 1 * *
*
* Business object n o i s n e t x e l a o g l a n o itr a e p o d n a n o it c n u F
CxPM1
CxPM0 Context extension
CCxPM1 CCxPM0 PM1 PM0
CxPM. CxPM0 and CxPM1 extend PM0 and PM1 with chunk C1 (Context) (Fig. 2).
C1 can be added to an existing meta-model for capturing context knowledge which
can impact the assignments relationships of a process model (e.g. the ability of actors
for playing roles according to a given context [
CPM. In some situations, organisation policies need to be enforced impacting
assignments decisions, for instance, separation of duties (see [
This paper provides a start points for the definition of a methodology allowing the design of adaptive and flexible BP meta-models according to the situation at hand. We have introduced the concepts of BPM-chunk and business method as well as example of chunks and meta-models in order to illustrate our proposal. We promote the fact that the final business process model has to be created from the set of proposed chunks in order to suit to a particular situation. This approach aims to make easier the definition of flexible and customised meta-models. Dealing with situationawareness raises many issues which need further research such as: the context influencing the selection of adequate chunks and the adaptation process.