Go4Flex: Goal-Oriented Process Modelling

Many companies consider business process management strategies a fundamental source for successful business operation. Despite this importance of business processes a conceptual and operational gap still exists between the business and the IT view of processes. In this paper we argue that an important reason for this gap is the strong focus of IT on the behaviour and execution perspective of workflows while more abstract and higher-level process properties are often neglected. This is especially apparent in the way processes are modelled and described on the IT-side using state of the art modelling approaches like BPMN. The presented Go4Flex research project, which is conducted in cooperation with Daimler AG, has the objective of bringing together both sides by establishing higher-level modelling concepts for workflows, which results both in increased intelligibility of workflow descriptions for business people and greater consideration for the way processes are described on the business side. The core idea of the approach is to strengthen the context perspective of a workflow by introducing different kinds of goals and goal relationships in addition to the established activity-centred behaviour model. The applicability of the approach is further illustrated with an example workflow from Daimler AG.