Towards Process-Aware Enterprise Software Environments - A Framework

To stay competitive at the market companies must tightly interlink their software systems in a process-oriented manner. While the business process paradigm has been widely accepted in practice, the majority of current software applications are still not yet implemented in a process-oriented way. But even if, process logic is hard-wired in the application code leading to inflexible and rigid software systems that do not reflect business needs. In such a scenario the quick adaptation of the software systems to changed business processes is almost impossible. Therefore, many software systems are already out of date at the time they are introduced into practice, and they generate high maintenance costs in the following. Due to this unsatisfactory business process support a software system’s return on investment is often low. By contrast technologies which enable the realization of process-aware enterprise software environments will significantly contribute to improve the added value of IT to a company’s business. In this paper we characterize process-aware enterprise software environments, describe benefits and present a conceptual framework outlining our theses.