Process and Data: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Companies increasingly adopt process management technology which offers promising perspectives for realizing flexible information systems. However, there still exist numerous process scenarios not adequately covered by contemporary information systems. One major reason for this deficiency is the insufficient understanding of the inherent relationships existing between business processes on the one side and business data on the other. Consequently, these two perspectives are not well integrated in many existing process management systems. This paper emphasizes the need for both object- and process-awareness in future information systems, and illustrates it along several examples. Especially, the relation between these two fundamental perspectives will be discussed, and the role of business objects and data as drivers for both process modeling and process enactment be emphasized. In general, any business process support should consider object behavior as well as object interactions, and therefore be based on two levels of granularity. In addition, data-driven process execution and integrated user access to processes and data are needed. Besides giving insights into these fundamental characteristics, an advanced framework supporting them in an integrated manner will be presented and its application to real-world process scenarios be shown. Overall, a holistic and generic framework integrating processes, data, and users will contribute to overcome many of the limitations of existing process management technology.