Title: Collaborative maintenance of business process models

Authors: Nuno Castela; Paulo Dias; Marielba Zacarias; José M. Tribolet

Addresses: Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, INESC INOVAÇÃO, Rua Alves Redol, n°9, 1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal; Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Av. Empresário, 6000-767 Castelo Branco, Portugal. ' Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Av. Empresário, 6000-767 Castelo Branco, Portugal. ' Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, INESC INOVAÇÃO, Rua Alves Redol, n°9, 1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal; Research Center for Spatial and Organizational Dynamics, University of Algarve, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal. ' Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, INESC INOVAÇÃO, Rua Alves Redol, n°9, 1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal; Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Campus Alameda, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1, 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract: Enterprise modelling helps improving individual and organisational self-awareness by allowing sharing knowledge about the organisation among its human actors through graphical representations. In order to achieve this goal, enterprise models must not only offer a trustworthy and reliable representation of different enterprise concerns, but such representation must be up-to-date. The work presented in this paper defines a collaborative 'as-is' business process model updating process that uses the annotation mechanism to create interaction contexts and enable business actors to communicate their knowledge about organisational processes turning it explicit and to discuss existing process representations in order to update them. The proposed approach allows actors to act as active updaters and modellers of the as-is business process model by comparing modelled with actually executed activities. The benefits of this approach have been gathered through several case studies in real organisational environment where a collaborative enterprise modelling tool was deployed to support the defined process.

Keywords: business process modelling; as-is business process models; model updating; collaborative maintenance; business process maintenance; enterprise modelling; organisational knowledge.

DOI: 10.1504/IJODE.2012.045903

International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, 2012 Vol.2 No.1, pp.61 - 84

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article