From Process Model to Electronic Business Process

Since the early nineties business processes have been coming more and more into the focus of IS research. As a consequence numerous approaches to process modelling have been developed such as Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs, ARIS House of Business), Semantic Object Model (SOM), Bonapart and INCOME/STAR. Many of these approaches concentrate on the socio-technical dimension of business processes. Hence, apart from technical aspects such as sequences, alternatives and parallel executions, they also consider strategic goals, objectives and organizational structures. Nevertheless, current trends in the areas of “Electronic Commerce” and “Electronic Office” indicate that in future more and more business processes will be run electronically. This requires a far-reaching automation of the concerned processes. But how do you automate a process model, e.g. an EPC? Where are the obstacles that block the way from such a process model to an electronic business process and how can we overcome them? The following sections show some of the important problems arising in this context and suggest possible solutions.