Maintenance of customized processes

When similar business processes are deployed in different organizations, one typically adapts manually a template process to the different execution environments and organizational needs. Service-Oriented Architectures facilitate the task of adaptation by exposing the functionalities needed by the process in an abstract way, decoupled from the implementation. Nevertheless, manual intervention to customize the processes is still highly necessary, making it hard to maintain the processes obtained as the result of customizations. Even more complex is the situation where several processes are customized independently but they are still treated as linked with each other or inherited from one base (reference) process. In this paper, we provide an initial investigation of customization of controllable processes.