Towards a Non-workflow Theory of Business Processes

The keynote overviews the efforts of a group of researchers and practitioners to build and test a theory of business processes (BP) that could be of use for building nonworkflow based business processes support (BPS) systems. The background for these efforts lies in two scientific disciplines outside the domain of business process management, namely: Systems Thinking and Mathematical System Theory. Systems Thinking served as an inspiration of regarding a BP instance/case as a temporal (sub)system created as a reaction on changes in the enterprise's external or/and internal environment and discarded after the goal set for the subsystem has been reached. This view can be explained with the help system-coupling diagrams from [1] as illustrated in Fig. 1. The diagram describes a general case when a particular situation in the environment, on the left-hand side of the diagram, causes a larger system, e.g., an enterprise, to create a respondent system, e.g., a project, to handle the situation. The respondent system is built from the assets that the larger system already has. Some of these assets are people, or other actors (e.g., robots). Other assets are control elements, e.g. policy documents, that define the behavior of the respondent system. The latter are denoted as black dots in Fig. 1.