Dynamic Switching of Perspectives on Business Processes

Process models represent process specifications. They contain workflows that require execution, in order to achieve business objectives and support business operation effectively. With the advent of Subject-oriented and Social Business Process Management, communication and stakeholder interaction have become major perspectives on how to design and implement processes. Since such a perspective does not seem to be very common when executing processes, stakeholders, including organizational developers and IT specialists, can be supported looking at process execution from either perspective, namely from a traditional one, targeting the flow of functions, and from an interactional perspective, focusing on interaction among stakeholders or system components encapsulating behavior. In this paper, we introduce the meta-model and architecture required for a respective dual mode support tool. The workflow execution engine UeberFlow allows checking the completeness of process specifications from either perspective. Consequently, stakeholders can start modeling with a perspective they are familiar with and proceed with the other one by switching dynamically to the alternate mode of modeling and execution.