Modelling Flexible Processes with Business Objects

Mainstream business process modelling techniques promote a design paradigm wherein the activities that may be performed within a case, together with their usual execution order, form the backbone on top of which other aspects are anchored. This Fordist paradigm, while effective in standardised and production-oriented domains, breaks when confronted with processes in which case-by-case variations and exceptions are the norm. We contend that the effective design of flexible processes calls for a substantially different modelling paradigm: one where processes are organized as interacting business objects rather than as chains of activities. This paper presents a meta-model for business process modelling based on business objects. The paper also presents a real-life case study in which a number of human service delivery processes were designed using the presented meta-model. The case study demonstrates that the meta-model addresses three key flexibility requirements encountered in this domain.