(Re-)Justifying BPM: A Quest for the Interaction Turn Reviewing Subject-Oriented BPM

Abstract

Taylorism and Fordism need to be questioned as modeling paradigm in BPM in changing work environments in a global economy, in particular for describing and implementing flexible business processes. In this article we demonstrate fundamental capabilities of communication-based modeling facilitating change management. The introduced subject-oriented BPM approach (S-BPM) recognizes subjects as active elements in a business process. They communicate with each other, not only to coordinate their work, but also capturing unpredictable events. Moreover, the S-BPM representation scheme covers how subjects are embedded into specific organizational and technical environments for operation, as validated models can be executed automatically. Such a streamlined separation of implementation and logical model increases the flexibility of business processes, and hereby the velocity of organizations significantly. The approach has already been successfully applied in several industrial projects, as shown by the evaluation results.