A Goal-Oriented Approach for Workflow Monitoring

Nowadays, the use of software systems implemented for automatically guiding and monitoring business processes is becoming a common option in modern enterprises. This kind of systems (workflow management systems) is designed to monitor tasks, documents, rules, computers etc. To do this, these software systems implement an automated representation of the enterprise processes. In most cases, these systems are mainly oriented to capture the tasks performed in the business from a processbased view. However, current workflow systems have neglected the goals and objectives that enterprise wants to achieve with the performance of business tasks. Therefore, in current workflow approaches, it could be very complicated to determine if these tasks actually satisfy the business goals. In this paper, the framework Tropos is used to model the goals of the business processes and also, to establish the mechanism to control and monitor the goals of each one of the actors involved in the process. With this, it is possible to measure the impact of the fulfillment of the actor goals in the satisfaction of the enterprise goals. A software tool, called GoalFlow has been developed in order to validate the proposed methodology. This approach enables the managers to take the appropriate decisions according to the knowledge on relevant aspects in process execution: who, what, how, and why.