Abstract
Process flexibility supports organisations to deal with changes, uncertainty, variations, and exceptions in business operations. Although several taxonomies of process flexibility have been proposed, the domain still lacks an ontological structure that clarifies and organises the domain. The current study fills this gap by building an ontology for improving process flexibility. Our results identify main business contexts, cases, dynamic modelling techniques, mechanisms to manage process flexibility, and their hierarchy relationships, which are structured into an ontology. The current study is significant as it provides a theoretical blueprint for improving the flexibility of organisational business processes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Mejri, A., Ghannouchi, S.A., Martinho, R.: Representing business process flexibility using concept maps. Procedia Comput. Sci. 100, 1260–1268 (2016)
Antunes, P., Tate, M., Pino, J.A.: Business processes and flexibility: a theoretical perspective. In: Australasian Conference on Information Systems, Perth, Western Australia (2019)
Cognini, R., et al.: Business process flexibility-a systematic literature review with a software systems perspective. Inf. Syst. Front. 20(2), 343–371 (2018)
Anastassiu, M., et al.: The quest for organizational flexibility: driving changes in business processes through the identification of relevant context. Bus. Process Manage. J. 22, 763–790 (2016)
Hinkelmann, K.: Business process flexibility and decision-aware modeling—the knowledge work designer. In: Karagiannis, D., Mayr, H., Mylopoulos, J. (eds.) Domain-Specific Conceptual Modeling, pp. 397–414. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39417-6_18
Reichert, M., Weber, B.: Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems: Challenges, Methods, Technologies. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30409-5
Schonenberg, H., Mans, R., Russell, N., Mulyar, N., van der Aalst, W.: Process flexibility: a survey of contemporary approaches. In: Dietz, Jan L.G., Albani, A., Barjis, J. (eds.) CIAO!/EOMAS - 2008. LNBIP, vol. 10, pp. 16–30. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68644-6_2
Lukyanenko, R., Parsons, J., Samuel, B.M.: Representing instances: the case for reengineering conceptual modelling grammars. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 28(1), 68–90 (2019)
Andaloussi, A.A., et al.: On the declarative paradigm in hybrid business process representations: a conceptual framework and a systematic literature study. Inf. Syst. 91, 101505 (2020)
Harmon, P.: Business Process Change: A Business Process Management Guide for Managers and Process Professionals. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington (2019)
Mejri, A.: A quantitative approach for measuring the degree of flexibility of business process models. Bus. Process Manage. J. 24(4), 1023–1049 (2018)
Reichert, M.: Enabling flexible and robust business process automation for the agile enterprise. In: Gruhn, V., Striemer, R. (eds.) The Essence of Software Engineering, pp. 203–220. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73897-0_12
Gruber, T.R.: A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowl. Acquis. 5(2), 199–220 (1993)
Osterwalder, A.: The business model ontology: A proposition in a design science approach. Institut d’Informatique et Organisation. Lausanne, Switzerland, University of Lausanne, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales HEC (2004)
Ostrowski, L., Helfert, M., Gama, N.: Ontology engineering step in design science research methodology: a technique to gather and reuse knowledge. Behav. Inf. Technol. 33(5), 443–451 (2014)
Thuan, N.H.: Business Process Crowdsourcing. PI. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91391-9
Schonenberg, H., et al.: Towards a taxonomy of process flexibility. In: CAiSE Forum (2008)
Regev, G., Soffer, P., Schmidt, R.: Taxonomy of flexibility in business processes. In: BPMDS 2006, vol. 236 (2006)
Nurdiani, I., Börstler, J., Fricker, S.A.: Literature review of flexibility attributes: a flexibility framework for software developing organization. J. Softw. Evol. Process 30(9), e1937 (2018)
Nickerson, R.C., Varshney, U., Muntermann, J.: A method for taxonomy development and its application in information systems. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 22(3), 336–359 (2012)
Corcho, O., López, M.F., Gómez-Pérez, A.: Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point? Data Knowl. Eng. 46(1), 41–64 (2003)
Paré, G., et al.: Synthesizing information systems knowledge: a typology of literature reviews. Inf. Manage. 52, 183–199 (2015)
Thuan, N.H., et al.: Building an enterprise ontology of business process crowdsourcing: a design science approach. In: PACIS 2015 Proceedings. AISeL (2015). Paper 112
Reichert, M., Hallerbach, A., Bauer, T.: Lifecycle management of business process variants. In: vom Brocke, J., Rosemann, M. (eds.) Handbook on Business Process Management 1. IHIS, pp. 251–278. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45100-3_11
vom Brocke, J., Zelt, S., Schmiedel, T.: On the role of context in business process management. Int. J. Inf. Manage. 36(3), 486–495 (2016)
Alter, M.J.: Science of Flexibility. Human Kinetics, Champaign (2004)
Boffoli, N., et al.: Driving flexibility and consistency of business processes by means of product-line engineering and decision tables. In: 2012 3rd International Workshop on Product LinE Approaches in Software Engineering (PLEASE). IEEE (2012)
Hidri, W., et al.: A Meta-model for context-aware adaptive business process as a service in collaborative cloud environment. Procedia Comput. Sci. 164, 177–186 (2019)
Weber, B., Reichert, M., Rinderle, S.: Change patterns and change support features – enhancing flexibility in process-aware information systems. Data Knowl. Eng. 66(3), 438–466 (2008)
Schnieders, A., Puhlmann, F.: Variability mechanisms in e-business process families. In: Business Information Systems–9th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2006. Gesellschaft für Informatik Ev (2006)
Fonseca, F., Martin, J.: Learning the differences between ontologies and conceptual schemas through ontology-driven information systems. J. Assoc. Inf. Syst. 8(2) (2007). Article 2
Wand, Y., Weber, R.: On the deep structure of information systems. Inf. Syst. J. 5(3), 203–223 (1995)
Guo, T., et al.: Codifying collaborative knowledge: using Wikipedia as a basis for automated ontology learning. Knowl. Manage. Res. Pract. 7(3), 206–217 (2009)
Wong, W., Liu, W., Bennamoun, M.: Ontology learning from text: a look back and into the future. ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 44(4) (2012). Article 20
Kumar, K., Narasipuram, M.M.: Defining requirements for business process flexibility. BPMDS 6, 137–148 (2006)
Soffer, P.: On the notion of flexibility in business processes. In: Proceedings of the CAiSE (2005)
Snowdon, R.A., et al.: On the architecture and form of flexible process support. Softw. Process Improv. Pract. 12(1), 21–34 (2007)
Okoli, C.: A guide to conducting a standalone systematic literature review. Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst. 37(1) (2015). Article 43
Webster, J., Watson, R.T.: Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: writing a literature review. MIS Q. 26(2), xiii–xxiii (2002)
Shishkov, B., Mendling, J.: Business process variability and public values. In: Shishkov, B. (ed.) BMSD 2018. LNBIP, vol. 319, pp. 401–411. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94214-8_31
Alexopoulou, N., Nikolaidou, M., Anagnostopoulos, D., Martakos, D.: An event-driven modeling approach for dynamic human-intensive business processes. In: Rinderle-Ma, S., Sadiq, S., Leymann, F. (eds.) BPM 2009. LNBIP, vol. 43, pp. 393–404. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12186-9_37
Nunes, V.T., Werner, C.M.L., Santoro, F.M.: Dynamic process adaptation: a context-aware approach. In: Proceedings of the 2011 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD). IEEE (2011)
Marcinkowski, B., Gawin, B.: A study on the adaptive approach to technology-driven enhancement of multi-scenario business processes. Inf. Technol. People 32, 118–146 (2019)
Di Ciccio, C., Marrella, A., Russo, A.: Knowledge-intensive processes: characteristics, requirements and analysis of contemporary approaches. J. Data Seman. 4(1), 29–57 (2015)
Böhringer, M.: Emergent case management for ad-hoc processes: a solution based on microblogging and activity streams. In: zur Muehlen, M., Su, J. (eds.) BPM 2010. LNBIP, vol. 66, pp. 384–395. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20511-8_36
Rittgen, P.: IT support in collaborative modelling of business processes–a comparative experiment. Int. J. Organ. Des. Eng. 1(1–2), 98–108 (2010)
Cardwell, H.E., Langsdale, S.: Collaborative modeling for decision support—definitions and next steps. In: World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2011: Bearing Knowledge for Sustainability (2011)
Schiffner, S., Rothschädl, T., Meyer, N.: Towards a subject-oriented evolutionary business information system. In: 2014 IEEE 18th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops and Demonstrations. IEEE (2014)
Gottanka, R., Meyer, N.: ModelAsYouGo: (re-) design of S-BPM process models during execution time. In: Stary, C. (ed.) S-BPM ONE 2012. LNBIP, vol. 104, pp. 91–105. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29133-3_7
Antunes, P., Pino, J.A., Tate, M., Barros, A.: eliciting process knowledge through process stories. Inf. Syst. Front. 22(5), 1179–1201 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-019-09922-0
Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Process-aware information systems. In: Fundamentals of Business Process Management, pp. 341–369. Springer, Heidelberg (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56509-4_9
Bauer, T.: Pre-modelled flexibility for business processes. In: ICEIS, vol. 2 (2019)
Oukharijane, J., et al.: A survey of self-adaptive business processes. In: International Business Information Management Association Conference, Seville, Spain (2018)
Geist, V., et al.: Towards functional safety and security for adaptive and flexible business processes. J. Softw. Evol. Process 30(5), e1952 (2018)
Andree, K., Ihde, S., Pufahl, L.: Exception handling in the context of fragment-based case management. In: Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Soffer, P., Zdravkovic, J. (eds.) BPMDS/EMMSAD -2020. LNBIP, vol. 387, pp. 20–35. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49418-6_2
Martinho, R., Domingos, D., Varajão, J.: CF4BPMN: a BPMN extension for controlled flexibility in business processes. Procedia Comput. Sci. 64, 1232–1239 (2015)
Marin, M.A., Hauder, M., Matthes, F.: Case management: an evaluation of existing approaches for knowledge-intensive processes. In: Reichert, M., Reijers, Hajo A. (eds.) BPM 2015. LNBIP, vol. 256, pp. 5–16. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42887-1_1
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Nguyen Quoc Hung for his research assistance.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Thuan, N.H., Phuong, H.A., George, M., Nkhoma, M., Antunes, P. (2020). Toward an Ontology for Improving Process Flexibility. In: Dang, T.K., Küng, J., Takizawa, M., Chung, T.M. (eds) Future Data and Security Engineering. FDSE 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12466. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63924-2_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63924-2_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-63923-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-63924-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)