Business Process Modeling and Agility

The objective of this thesis was to investigate business process agility and develop modeling approaches that ensure agility in business process design and execution. Business process agility is part of a broader agility issue, i.e. enterprise agility. The latter is a polymorphous concept that concerns all the aspect of an enterprise. Towards a comprehensive and systematic analysis of enterprise agility, a viewpoint-oriented architecture was developed and based on this, a two-phase approach was proposed. In the first phase, each viewpoint is examined separately in terms of agility, while in the second phase agility is investigated through the combination of viewpoints. Business processes correspond to an enterprise viewpoint. As such, the two-phase approach was applied in business process viewpoint for the exploration of business process agility requirements. The outcome was the specification of important requirements that led in the development of an event-driven business process modeling approach that promotes agility in business process execution. This approach was applied in the design of medical processes. The medical case study aided in the evaluation of the proposed event-driven approach in respect to the identified requirements. Based on the evaluation, a more mature version of the eventdriven approach was shaped, named “Notify and Register”. “Notify and Register” is an event-driven modeling approach that ensures agility in dynamic, human-intensive business processes. “Notify and Register” was validated through a case study from the medical domain again. More specifically, patient treatment was chosen, which is a typical example of dynamic human-intensive processes.