A framework for managing business process changes

초록

Lots of BPM (Business Process Management) researchers and solution vendors are addressing the importance of the life cycle support of business process. BPM life cycle management emphasizes not only defining and executing business processes, but also improving business processes after analyzing the results of process execution. In general, business process improvement involves modification of the existing processes. Although it is important to support managing business process changes, there has not been much research on this issue. We discuss a framework for managing business process improvement and changes. Under the framework, we provide business process change patterns that occur recurrently, and propose a scheme for managing version of a business process based on the concept of the business process change pattern. The version control scheme incorporates several useful concepts such as run-time encapsulation of business processes, process promotion and demotion. We also present a guideline for BPM system developers to implement such concepts in BPM system. It is expected that organizations adopting BPM system can manage various business process changes efficiently and improve their business processes using the framework proposed in this paper.