Empowering End-users with Object-aware Processes

Business process management systems from various vendors are used by companies around the globe. Most of these systems allow for the full or partial automation of business processes by ensuring that tasks and data are presented to the right person at the right time during process execution. However, almost all established BPMS employ the activity-centric process support paradigm, in which the various forms, i.e., the main way for users to input data into the process, have to be created by hand. Furthermore, traditional activity-centric process management systems are limited in their flexibility as all possible execution variants have to be taken into account by the process modeler. Therefore, large amounts of research have gone into developing alternative process support paradigms, with a large focus on enabling more flexibly executable processes. This article takes one of these paradigms, object-aware process management, and presents the concepts we developed while researching the possibility of bringing the power and flexibility of non-activity-centric process support paradigms to the people that matter: the end-users working with the processes. The contribution of this article are the concepts, ideas, and lessons learned during the development and evaluation of the PHILharmonicFlows runtime user interface, which allows for the generation of an entire user interface, complete with navigation and forms, based on an object-aware process model. This novel approach allows for the generation of entire information systems, complete with data storage, process logic, and now fully functional user interfaces in a fully generic fashion from data-centric object-aware process models.