Data management perspectives on business process management: tutorial overview

Traditional approaches to Business Process Management (BPM) focus primarily on the process aspects, and treat the persistent data accessed and manipulated by the business processes as second class citizens. A recent approach to BPM, based on "business artifacts", is centered on a modeling framework that places data and process on an equal footing. The approach has been shown useful in various application domains, and one variant of business artifacts forms the basis of the emerging OMG Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standard. Research results have been developed around conceptual models, enterprise interoperation, business intelligence, and verification. This data-centric approach has the potential to provide the basis for a new generation of BPM technology in support of diverse application, and fueled by the insights into abstraction and data management that have been the hallmark of database research since the 70's.