Object-aware Business Processes: Properties, Requirements, Existing Approaches

Despite the increasing maturity of process management technology not all business processes are adequately supported by it. In particular, support for unstructured and knowledge-intensive processes is missing, especially since they cannot be straight-jacketed into predefined activities. A common characteristic of these processes is the role of busi-ness objects and data as drivers for process modeling and enactment. This paper elicits fundamental requirements for effectively supporting such object-aware processes; i.e., their modeling, execution and monitoring. Based on these requirements, we evaluate imperative, declarative, and data-driven process support approaches and investigate how well they support object-aware processes. We consider a tight integration of process and data as major step towards further maturation of process management technology.