End user driven business process composition [Elektronische Ressource] / von Todor Stoitsev

Todor Stoitsev

Sujets

• Informatik
• Management

Informations

• Publié par: technischen_universitat_darmstadt
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 31
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

End-User Driven Business Process Composition
vom Fachbereich Informatik
der Technischen Universität Darmstadt
genehmigte
Dissertation
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines
Doktor-Ingenieurs (Dr.-Ing.)
von
Diplom-Ingenieur
Todor Stoitsev
aus Sofia, Bulgarien
Referent: Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser
Korreferent: Dr. Fabio Paternò
Tag der Einreichung: 05 Mai 2009
Tag der Mündlichen Prüfung: 17 Juni 2009
Darmstadt 2009
Hochschulkennziffer D17Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung
Hiermit erkläre ich, die vorgelegte Arbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades “Dr.-Ing.” mit
dem Titel “End-User Driven Business Process Composition” selbständig und ausschließlich unter
Verwendung der angegebenen Hilfsmittel erstellt zu haben. Ich habe bisher noch keinen
Promotionsversuch unternommen.
Darmstadt, den 30.04.2009 Dipl.-Ing. Todor StoitsevAcknowledgments
Writing a dissertation is an ambitious endeavor which is hardly possible without support from
various directions. This dissertation is not an exception. Therefore I would like to thank all people
who supported me on my way to the doctoral degree.
My thanks go to:
My advisor Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser for providing me with valuable guidance and
teaching me to look beyond the horizon. This dissertation would not have been possible
without him.
x My co-supervisor Dr. Fabio Paternò for the kind support and constructive feedback on
the concepts developed in the thesis.
x Dr. Knut Manske who believed in me and encouraged all my achievements on the path to
the dissertation.
x Dr. Stefan Scheidl for his extraordinary engagement in helping me to settle down in
Germany, for preparing a fruitful ground for the research in the thesis and for assisting
me in the different phases of my research.
Dr. Felix Flentge for the constructive feedback on concepts developed in the thesis.
Dr. Nicolay Mehanjiev for the fruitful cooperation on the empirical questionnaire studies
and for providing guidance on end-user development topics.
Dr. Uwe Riss and Olaf Grebner for the cooperation on the task management and task
pattern concepts.
x Michael Spahn for the teamwork and for being with me in the trenches.
Dr. Birgit Zimmermann for the constructive feedback on the research concepts and for
taking care of the research project and leaving me space to work on the dissertation.
Victoria Carlsson for her vital support in the preliminary empirical studies and task
analysis.
Daniel Zwicker, Teena Vellaramkalayil, Axel Schulz, Simon Stebbins, and Markus
Wiemann for their contributions to the development of the CTM system.
x All colleagues from the Telecooperation Group at the Darmstadt University of
Technology and at SAP Research CEC Darmstadt for the friendly working atmosphere
and the valuable feedback on my research in the doctoral seminars.
All people from the industrial partner companies who participated in the user studies and
evaluation phases.
x Above all, I would like to thank to my beloved wife Brigita Zareva-Stoitseva, for her love
and care, for helping me not to forget the really important things in life and for making it
all worthwhile.
Darmstadt, April 2009
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xAbstract
Business Process Management (BPM) solutions enable enterprises to consolidate and optimize
their business operations and to gain competitive advantage in the fast evolving global market.
Often, the only ones to understand the matter and complexity of business processes are the end
users of enterprise software, who execute them on a daily basis. The need to involve end users in
business process composition during the implementation of BPM solutions in enterprises is
clearly perceived. However, end users have a detailed domain expertise but limited technical
skills. Therefore upfront process modeling through conventional modeling notations remains
inaccessible for them. The need for user-centric process composition approaches arises, which
can enable end users to tailor business processes according to their actual expertise and problem
solving strategies. Furthermore, these approaches need to bridge the process understanding of end
users and technically skilled process designers and developers in the course of workflow projects
in order to facilitate the development of real-life compliant and consistent process models and to
streamline the uptake of BPM software in enterprises.
This thesis addresses end-user driven composition of both: (i) weakly-structured process
models for supporting underspecified, human-centric business processes and (ii) structured
business process models for automation of rigidly recurring processes through workflow engines.
Both process types are composed through programming by example in a collaborative task
management system. Task management is chosen as a starting point for end-user driven process
composition in order to reconcile the personal and the enterprise perspectives on business
processes. Programming by example is an end-user development technique, which enables
capturing and repeated execution of user activities in a software system. The application of this
technique in an enterprise scope for the composition of business process models is novel and
requires specific support from user’s perspective and from formal system’s perspective.
The four major scientific contributions of the thesis can be captured as: (i) a task management
model for human-centric business processes; (ii) a method for composition of weakly-structured
process models through collaborative task management; (iii) a method for transformation of
weakly-structured process models to structured workflows and their refinement based on
deviations with ad-hoc tasks at runtime; (iv) the holistic concept for end-user driven business
process composition through programming by example, composing contributions (i) through (iii)
into a seamless overarching method and architecture for the composition of weakly-structured
and structured process models. The elaborated concepts provide a significant contribution to
known process modeling approaches in various research areas such as human-computer
interaction, BPM, workflow management and computer supported cooperative work.
The presented concepts found on preliminary empirical studies, comprising an online
questionnaire distributed to a number of companies from various industries, and a series of field
studies in three German small and medium enterprises. The preliminary studies deliver strong
support for end-user development in the domain of task management and identify entry points for
introducing process tailoring to end users. These studies provide input for the elaborated task
management model and drive the design choices for the architecture, underling the presented
holistic concept.
The presented concepts take into consideration existing end user work practices and software
applications for management of day-to-day activities, such as email and personal to-do list
applications delivered with standard office environments. The task management model enables
aggregation of data from these applications for the composition of weakly-structured business
process models. These models can be repeatedly adapted and reused for the execution of ad-hoc,
human-centric processes. The method for generation of structured workflows from weakly-
structured process models enables automation of rigidly recurring processes through workflow
engines. Generated workflows can be extended by process designers and developers, in a sharedcontext between user-defined and formal process models. The mapping of weakly-structured
process models to structured workflow models facilitates data reuse between ad-hoc and
operational processes. Enhanced data sharing and interoperability between ad-hoc and structured
processes is enabled through the introduced holistic concept and the underlying architecture.
The presented concepts have been implemented and validated through a prototype called
Collaborative Task Manager. The evaluation results confirm that the proposed end-user
development approach and its enterprise-wide application through the presented concepts
efficiently enable end-user driven business process composition. Thus the specified task
management model, methods and holistic concept can be used for designing user-tailorable BPM
systems that facilitate the adoption of BPM technology in enterprises.
Keywords: end-user development, human-computer interaction, business process management,
workflow modeling, computer-supported cooperative work, knowledge management.Zusammenfassung
Geschäftsprozessmanagementlösungen ermöglichen es Unternehmen ihre Geschäftsabläufe zu
konsolidieren und zu optimieren, und dadurch einen Wettbewerbsvorteil in der sich schnell
entwickelnden Marktumgebung zu erzielen. Sehr oft sind die einzigen Personen, die
Geschäftsprozesse im Detail kennen, die Endanwender von Unternehmenssoftware, die diese
Gesozesse im Rahmen ihrer täglichen Arbeitspraxis ausführen. Hierdurch entsteht die
Notwendigkeit, Endanwender in die Komposition von Geschäftsprozessen während der
Implementierung von Geschäftsprozessmanagementlösungen in Unternehmen einzubeziehen.
Endanwender besitzen eine detaillierte Fachexpertise, aber nur begrenzt