Flexible Business Processes - Evaluation of Current Approaches

1 Motivation The way people work, especially in group-based or creative processes, is getting more and more unpredictable. This is based on today's fast-changing business world which is characterized by dynamic conditions. In order to fulfill these flexible business situations, there is a need for the use of support systems. However, classical support systems do not offer the necessary agility to support today's rapidly changing or generally unpredictable workflows due to their static runtime execution. Thus, modern workflow systems have the need to provide a flexible, but process aware execution at runtime that do not force users into a pre-defined way of doing their work. In addition to these new requirements, they must still support users during the execution like classical systems already do (Herbst 2004, p. 4). However, to find the right balance between both tasks is highly challenging. examined systems were not appropriate for supporting flexible or so called ad-hoc (cf. section two) workflows. Thus, this paper evaluates the state-of-the-art of current systems based on the viewpoint which requirements have already been achieved and for which requirements technical concepts are still to be developed. Furthermore, the paper clarifies whether there is a comprehensive approach which can be used in every business context or which approach can be used in which specific context. To achieve such an evaluation, the paper defines the basics of flexibility and details concerning business processes and process support within section two. Subsequently, a framework with six criterions is derived which allows a structural evaluation (cf. section four) of the reviewed approaches and technology (cf. section three).