Semi-formal modelling of the organisational collaboration processes with operational design tool

Abstract

Since the notion of business processes proved successful in integrating the major aspects of a single organization, i.e. activities, roles and business objects, it is now challenging to study how to relate business processes with cross enterprise collaboration issues as effective and efficient inter-organizational collaboration becomes more and more important. This paper introduces the notion of semi-formal modelling of the collaboration processes in order to define the collections of activities, roles and behaviours that support critical organisational functions in achieving a joint objective. It also emphasizes that formal modelling techniques (UML, ARIS, BPMN etc) are not perfectly suited for describing collaboration processes, because they lack the most appropriate and simple notations for representing the coordination behaviours of multiple actors participating in collaborative work, and offer no meaningful support for expressing responsibilities in collaboration context with respect to formality, simplicity and expressiveness or resulting complexity. A support environment, called Operational Design Tool (ODT), is presented in this paper, which enables the user to easily create, adapt, change and publish process diagrams within turbulent environments using easy-to-use modelling notations.