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Agile Business Process Management Agile Business Process Management Concepts and Tools for Long-running Autonomous Business Processes Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades an der Fakultät für Mathematik, Informatik und Naturwissenschaften Fachbereich Informatik der Universität Hamburg vorgelegt von Kai Jander Hamburg, 2016 [? ] Tag der Disputation: 29.04.2016 Die folgenden Gutachter haben diese Dissertation zur Annahme empfohlen: Prof. Dr. Winfried Lamersdorf, Universität Hamburg Prof. Dr. Tilo Böhmann, Universität Hamburg Prof. Dr. Ingo J. Timm, Universität Trier © 2016 Kai Jander Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire work is permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. Abstract Business Process Management is a widespread approach for structuring actions and labor within organizations and covers a multitude of social, organizational and technological aspects with the goal of improving efficiency and manageability of organizations. Concepts for production and administrative business process is highly developed and such business processes tend to be well-supported with tools and systems provided by the market. Such processes are often highly structured with a fairly limited number of variations in their execution and are executed many times, often in parallel, in order to manufacture a product or provide a service. The lifetime of such process instances is often very limited. This type of highly structured mode of operation with high rigidity is very dif- ferent from another set of business processes that are increasingly common within many organizations: These processes are collaborative business processes, where a group of participants engage in a creative process such as product development. Col- laborative processes are characterized by very long execution times in the scale of years, a high degree of expected variation due to changes becoming necessary during execution and workflow participants requiring a high degree of autonomy to perform their creative tasks and applying their expert knowledge. This kind of process is difficult to model using traditional business process management toolsets aimed at production processes and is therefore often organized in an informal fashion. For these types of processes, flexibility, the ability to react to changes, and agility, the preparedness for future changes, becomes important issues. This work introduces an agile approach for business process management based on goal-oriented business process models and distributed workflow management which aims to provide better support for this type of business processes by focusing on their self-organizing and collaborative properties. The approach addresses both conceptual and technical aspects by directly using business goals as model elements in business process models. This goal-oriented modeling allows for a high degree of execution flexibility, agility and, for the workflow participants, autonomy while maintaining a strong link to the strategic business goals of processes. The distributed workflow management not only enables technical execution of such processes but also allows for high flexibility and agility in terms of organizational structures and structural changes before and during execution. The distributed workflow management also enables the purposeful addition of system redundancy for a high level of robustness over the long execution time of the processes. Kurzzusammenfassung Geschäftsprozessmanagement ist ein verbreiteter Ansatz um Tätigkeiten und Ar- beit innerhalb von Organisationen zu strukturieren und umfasst eine Vielzahl an sozialen, organisatorischen und technologischen Aspekten mit dem Ziel, die Effizienz und Handhabbarkeit von Organisationen zu verbessern. Konzepte bezüglich Pro- duktionsprozessen und administrativen Prozessen ist sehr ausgereift und daher wer- den diese Art von Geschäftsprozessen im Allgemeinen durch am Markt erhältliche Werkzeuge und Systeme gut unterstützt. Dieser Art der Prozesse sind meistens stark strukturiert mit einer begrenzten Anzahl von Ausführungsvarianten und werden viele Male, oftmals auch parallel, ausgeführt um ein Produkt herzustellen oder eine Di- enstleistung bereitzustellen. Die Lebensdauer solcher Prozessinstanzen ist in vielen Fällen sehr kurz. Dieser Typ von stark strukturiertem und sehr rigiden Geschäftsprozess unterscheidet sich sehr stark von einer anderen Menge an Geschäftsprozessen, welche in zunehmenden Maße in vielen Organisationen zu finden ist: Diese Prozesse sind kollaborative Geschäftsprozesse, in welchen die Teilnehmer sich in einem kreativen Prozess wie etwa der Produktentwicklung betätigen. Kollaborative Geschäftsprozesse sind geprägt durch sehr lange Ausführungszeiten welche Jahre umfassen kann, ein hohes Maß an erwarteten Varianten durch Änderungen welche während der Ausführungszeit notwendig werden und Prozessteilnehmer, welche einen hohen Grad an Autonomie zur Durchführung ihrer kreativen Tätigkeiten und Anwendung ihres Expertenwissens benötigen. Diese Art von Prozess ist mit herkömmlichen Werkzeugen des Geschäftsprozessmanagements, welche vor allem die Produktionsprozesse im Fokus haben, nur schwer zu modellieren und werden daher häufig informell organisiert. Für diese Art von Prozessen werden Flexibilität, die Fähigkeit zur Anpassung an Änderungen, sowie Agilität, die Vorbereitung auf zukünftige Änderungen, zu wichti- gen Belangen. Diese Arbeit führt einen agilen Ansatz für das Geschäftsprozessman- agement basierend auf zielorienterter Geschäftsprozessmodellierung und verteiltem Workflow-Management ein, welcher zum Ziel hat, die Unterstützung für diese Art von Geschäftsprozessen durch Fokussierung auf ihre selbstorganisierenden und kol- laborativen Eigenschaften zu verbessern. Der Ansatz umfasst sowohl konzeptuelle als auch technische Aspekte durch die direkte Verwendung von Geschäftszielen als Modellelemente in Geschäftsprozessmodellen. Dieses zieloriente Modellieren erlaubt einen hohen Grad an Flexibilität, Agilität und, für die Geschäftsprozessteilnehmer, Autonomie unter Beibehaltung einer starken Bindung an die strategischen Geschäft- sziele von Prozessen. Das verteilte Workflow-Management ermöglicht nicht nur die technische Ausführung solcher Prozesse, sondern erlaubt ein hohes Maß an Flexi- bilität und Agilität in Bezug auf organisatorische Strukturen und strukturelle Än- derungen sowohl vor als auch während der Ausführung. Das verteilte Workflow- Management ermöglicht ebenfalls das gezielte Hinzufügen von Systemredundanz für eine hohes Niveau an Robustheit während der langen Ausführungszeit der Prozesse. Acknowledgements This work is the results of cross-disciplinary research that was only possible in the conducive research environment created, against all external and internal odds, by a large number of people involved in it, for many of whom I will not be able to personally express my gratitude here. Nevertheless, I would like to express my explicit and deep gratitude for a number of key individuals that made this research and journey possible. First, I would like to honor and acknowledge my colleagues Dr. Lars Braubach and Dr. Alexander Pokahr for the fantastic research collaboration and highly pro- ductive work and exchange, which was enabled and furthered by the freedom and support granted by my advisor Prof. Winfried Lamersdorf. In addition, I would also express my gratitude towards my colleagues at Daimler AG for letting me have a peek into the structure and organization of a large cor- poration as well as the collaborative work we were able to conduct, in particular, my gratitude goes towards Birgit Burmeister for her initial work and her unrelenting support for this project as well as Birgit Leißler for the hands-on experience of a real-world collaborative process. Finally, on a personal level, my sincere gratitude belongs to Meg Phillips for supporting me personally, enduring frustrations and joyfully sharing the progress of this project over the years. Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Traditional Focus of Business Process Management and Agile Business Process Management . .1 1.2 Research Questions and Goals regarding Long-running Autonomous Processes . .6 2 Business Process Management 19 2.1 Organizational Aspects of Business Process Management . 21 2.1.1 Functional Organizations . 22 2.1.2 Process-oriented Organizations . 25 2.2 Types of Business Processes . 27 2.3 Organizational Challenges . 28 2.4 Introducing Business Processes Management in Organizations . 32 2.5 Business Process Management Systems . 35 2.6 Business Processes and Workflows . 36 2.7 Business Process Management and Workflow Management . 40 2.8 Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) . 45 3 Business Process Modeling Languages 49 3.1 Task-based Business Process and Workflow Modeling Languages . 51 3.2 Flowcharts . 52 3.3 Workflow Languages based on Petri-nets . 53 3.4 Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) . 55 3.5 Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) . 58 3.6 Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) . 59 3.7 Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) . 60 3.7.1 Events . 61 3.7.2 Activities . 63 3.7.3 Sequence Flows . 66 3.7.4 Gateways . 66 3.7.5 Message Flows . 68 3.7.6 Pools and Lanes . 68 3.7.7 Text Annotations . 69 3.7.8 Associations . 70 Contents 3.7.9 Additional BPMN Elements . 70 3.7.9.1 Data Objects . 71 3.7.9.2 Messages . 71 3.8 Limitations of Task-based Business Process and Workflow Modeling Languages . 72 3.9 Rule-based Workflow Modeling . 76 3.10 Workflow Instance Agility with Adept2 . 79 3.11 Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) . 81 4 Goal-oriented Business
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