Service Process Interaction and Modeling

Abstract

The role of Knowledge-intensive Business Services (KIBS) has been enlarged in modern business environment. As well as the enterprises in any other kinds of industries, Business Process Management (BPM) can be a source of core competency for the enterprises in KIBS industry. However, most of the business processes in KIBS are human processes which are collaborative, innovative, and dynamic, which cannot be supported well by current BPM technologies. This research suggests utilizing process patterns to address this problem, and defines condition-based process patterns divided into workflow patterns and interaction patterns. Using and combining process patterns facilitate modeling larger processes.

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Works about business service process modeling6

Works about business process patterns7

Supportive activity management of HIM8

Conclusions13

References14

Service Process Interaction and Modeling

Introduction

The role of Knowledge-intensive Business Services (KIBS) has been enlarged in modern business environment. In general terms, KIBS are mainly concerned with providing knowledge-intensive efforts to the business processes of other organizations, including clients of private and public sector (Muller & Doloreuz, 2007). Business consulting services, research & development services, marketing & communication services, software development services, legal services, human resource development services, and financing services are included as KIBS (Forssen, Keikkonen, Hietala, Hanninen, & Kontio, 2010).

As well as the enterprises in any other kinds of industries, Business Process Management (BPM) can be a source of core competency for the enterprises in KIBS industry, as they are integrated sets of Knowledge-intensive Business Service processes. However, current BPM methodologies and solutions support the mechanistic, predetermined system-to-system scenarios with predefined workflow and inter-application transaction management only (Fingar, 2008), because current BPM techniques has traditionally focused on the automated coordination of business processes, examining how systems interact with each other and how the logic of business processes can be embedded into enterprise systems (Han, Kauranen, Kristola, & Merinen, 2007).

This is caused by ignoring human processes which require human creativeness such as researching, propositioning, negotiating, designing, scheduling, managing, analyzing and so on. These human processes are fundamentally collaborative, innovative, and dynamic unlike other mechanistic processes (Harrison-Broninski, 2010a). In KIBS, most of business processes are such human processes. Because works for creating and dealing knowledge in KIBS are performed based on human creativeness, and the works requires human collaborations to share and deliver knowledge. Therefore, new theories of BPM which can adequately deal with human processes are required for managing and modeling processes in KIBS. An alternative to the requirement is Human Interaction Management (HIM) (Harrison-Broninski, 2010b).

HIM proposes variety of principles, features, concepts, and patterns which are specially devised for dealing with human processes. First of all, HIM adopts Role-Activity Diagram (RAD) (Ould & Huckvale, 2010) for human-centered process modeling. And HIM suggests five key principles: (1) connection visibility, (2) structured messaging, (3) support mental work, (4) supportive (rather than prescriptive) activity management, and (5) processes change processes. Among them, this research focuses on 'supportive activity management'. Supportive activity management means that process models and process management should not restrict working activities of human processes rigidly. People do what they feel to be ...