Articulation of subject-oriented business process models

Abstract

Business process elicitation needs to capture, document, and share the expertise and experiences develop over time by the involved workers. This paper presents an approach for elicitation of subject-oriented business process models from operatively involved people, who are not expert modelers. The approach facilitates individual articulation and collaborative consolidation of work knowledge. An instrument based on physical structure elaboration techniques is introduced to represent procedural knowledge in conceptual models of collaborative work. These physical models are captured digitally and transformed to syntactically correct S-BPM models. Capturing is supported by interactive tools, which allow to correct syntactic errors. Semantic completeness of the models is archived by interactive refinement during simulated enactment using a process validation engine. The paper shows the feasibility of the approach in two case studies and identifies requirements on interactive guidance during model capturing and interpretation.