Adapting the UML to Business Modelling's Needs - Experiences in Situational Method Engineering

In 1999 the Swiss Mobiliar Insurance Company (Mobiliar) started a program to transform to a process oriented organization. Based on reengineered business processes, the refocusing of the information system infrastructure was strived. To ensure a unified methodical procedure during this transformation a competence center was founded. It supports project specific needs by situational method engineering. At inception PROMET BPR and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) were chosen. During the first projects, the requirements for method support changed from being purely process engineered, to a focus of supporting process improvement. This paper characterizes the phases and the specific needs they raise. It shows the evolution and integration of the method fragments. Thereby, the main focus is to describe how the concepts of UML would be linked in particular to ratios of process management in the meta-model of this reengineered method.