Instances and Connectors : Issues for a SecondGeneration Process

Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been deened, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience 1, 3, 4]. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a process model as a description and the, possibly multiple, enacting instances which are created from it. Connectors refers to the issue of concurrency control and achieving a higher level of abstraction in how parts of a model interact. We believe that these issues are key to developing systems which can eeectively support business processes, and that they have not received suucient attention within the process modelling community. Through exploring these issues we also illustrate our approach to designing a second generation process language. 1 1 Background Over the past 8 years the Informatics Process Group at Manchester has developed a number of enactable process models using ICL's ProcessWise Integrator (PWI) 2] as our support technology, more recently linked with a Web interface in our ProcessWeb system 16, 6]. In parallel the research group has undertaken considerable work on developing a process modelling method which places process models at a pivotal postion between the business process and the IT systems providing appropriate support. Key to this is a clear mapping between models which can be discussed and veri-ed with people in the business, and models which are used by a support system 8]. In our industrial case studies, the feedback has been that both descriptive models which allow people to discuss a process, and enactable models which support the people as they are doing the process, are valuable. However, the