Architecture for end user-driven composition of underspecified, human-centric business processes

Enterprises are constantly struggling to optimize their business processes in order to gain competitive advantage and to survive in the fast evolving global market. Often, the only ones to understand the matter and complexity of these processes are the people, who actually execute them. This raises the need for novel business process management approaches, which can enable business users to proactively express process knowledge and to participate in the business process management and design according to their actual expertise and problem solving strategies. The presented paper describes an architecture, which supports a framework for end user-driven composition and management of underspecified, human-centric business processes. The solution builds up on email-integrated task management and enables dynamic generation of decentralized-emerging process structures through web service-based activity tracking. The captured process execution examples are shared in central enterprise repositories for further adaptation and reuse. This enables "seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding" of user-defined, weakly-structured process models towards global best-practice definitions