Abstract. Process–aware information systems (PAIS) must provide sufficient flexibility to their users to support a broad spectrum of application scenarios. As a response to this need adaptive process management systems (PMS) have emerged, supporting both ad-hoc deviations from the predefined process schema and the quick adaptation of the PAIS to business process changes. This newly gained runtime flexibility, however, imposes challenging security issues as the PMS becomes more vulnerable to misuse. Process changes must be restricted to authorized users, but without nullifying the advantages of a flexible system by handling authorizations in a too rigid way. This paper discusses requirements relevant in this context and proposes a comprehensive access control (AC) model with special focus on adaptive PMS. On the one hand, our approach allows the compact definition of user dependent access rights restricting process changes to authorized users only. On the other hand, the definition of process type dependent access rights is supported to only allow for those change commands which are applicable within a particular process context. Respective AC mechanisms will be key ingredients in future adaptive PMS. 1

Research into computer support for colocated small group meetings has not delivered any significant benefit in spite of significant investment and decades of research. We suggest that the focus has been on the wrong problem. Each time a process is enacted in small group work it will different (even if only slightly different) due to the situational context. Therefore the process for supporting the process should also be different each time and prescriptive, systematised support will be of little value in this situation. We propose that the processes must be exposed and identified dynamically so that useful support can be provided when it is required and one of the first steps is to understand what people are doing in these processes. The main contribution of this paper is a framework for helping researchers to understand the problem before considering a solution.

Goal-orientation is a widespread and useful approach to Requirements Engineering. However, quality assessment frameworks focused on goaloriented processes are either limited or remain on the theoretical side. Requirements quality initiatives range from simple metrics applicable to requirements documents, to general-purpose quality frameworks that include syntactic, semantic and pragmatic concerns. In some recent works, we have proposed a metrics framework for goal-oriented models, but the approach did not cover the cycle of quality assessment. In this paper we present a semiotic-based quality assessment proposal built upon the i * framework and the SEQUAL proposal. We propose a simplification of SEQUAL which can be applied to i * models by defining semantic, pragmatic and social metrics. As a result, we obtain suites of metrics that can be applied to i * goaloriented requirements models. This theoretical work is put into practice by using iStarML, a XML representation of i * models, over which XQuery sentences compute the proposed metrics.

Abstract – This paper presents a separation of concerns

Abstract: Enterprises are constantly struggling to optimize their business processes in order to gain competitive advantage and to survive in the fast evolving global market. Often, the only ones to understand the matter and complexity of these processes are the people, who actually execute them. This raises the need for novel business process management approaches, which can enable business users to proactively express process knowledge and to participate in the business process management and design according to their actual expertise and problem solving strategies. The presented paper describes an architecture, which supports a framework for end user-driven composition and management of underspecified, human-centric business processes. The solution builds up on email-integrated task management and enables dynamic generation of decentralized-emerging process structures through web service-based activity tracking. The captured process execution examples are shared in central enterprise repositories for further adaptation and reuse. This enables “seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding ” of user-defined, weakly-structured process models towards global best-practice definitions. 1

Letting end users tailor business processes can result in business process management support, which is better turned to users ’ needs and organizational changes. However, such tailoring requires not only the users ’ domain expertise but also advanced skills in computer use, which business users mostly lack. The paper presents the design of the Collaborative Task Manager (CTM) prototype which overcomes this limitation and enables end users to become informed participants in business process composition. CTM uses enterprise-wide “programming by example ” by exposing common functionalities for personal task management to the end users and tracking their activities to generate end-to-end process execution examples on a central instance. These can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal process models, which enables tailoring as collaboration between business users, end-user tailors and developers. The paper finally reports on trial usage of the tool at a partner company. 1.

Abstract. The need to involve business users in process modeling is largely perceived in the context of Business Process Management systems. This can facilitate the elaboration of consistent process models which are better turned to users ’ needs and organizational changes. Despite the variety of tools and notations, process modeling remains hardly accessible for business users, who lack advanced technical skills. This paper presents an integrated approach for end-user driven business process modeling which uses web service based activity tracking to generate weakly-structured process models by capturing data on personal task management. These models can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal workflows by delivering the business knowledge to process designers and software developers. Interconnection of ad-hoc and formal workflows results in enhanced process flexibility and allows complementation of formal workflows through deviations at runtime. The approach is validated through the Collaborative Task Management (CTM) prototype.

human computer interaction. Abstract: Enterprises face the challenge of managing underspecified, human-centric business processes, which are executed in distributed teams in a rather informal, ad-hoc manner. This gave hibernating CSCW and ad-hoc workflow research a new push recently. However, there is still the need to clearly perceive end users as the actual drivers of business processes and to enable them to proactively tailor these processes according to their actual expertise and problem solving strategies. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a prototype for end-user development of weakly-structured process models through email-integrated task management. The presented CTM (Collaborative Task Manager) prototype uses “programming by example ” to leverage user experience with standard email and task management applications and to extend user skills towards the definition of reusable process structures. By closely correlating to the actual user work practices and software environment, the tool provides a “gentle slope of complexity ” for end users engaging in process tailoring activities. 1

Abstract: On the one hand models can be used as navigational tools respecting mental processing capabilities of persons. On the other hand models can be analyzed automatically by information systems to deduce relevant content for knowledge management IT-components as E-Learning-Applications, KM-Portals, document management systems, etc.. Therefore models of knowledge intensive business processes are a natural integration layer for persons and information systems providing the relevant context to interpret and handle information the right way. It has only to be solved how to interface these models efficiently from a person as well as from an information system point of view.

Goal-orientation is a widespread and useful approach to Requirements Engineering. However, quality assessment frameworks focused on goaloriented processes are either limited or remain on the theoretical side. Requirements quality initiatives range from simple metrics applicable to requirements documents, to general-purpose quality frameworks that include syntactic, semantic and pragmatic concerns. In some recent works, we have proposed a metrics framework for goal-oriented models, but the approach did not cover the cycle of quality assessment. In this paper we present a semiotic-based quality assessment proposal built upon the i * framework and the SEQUAL proposal. We propose a simplification of SEQUAL which can be applied to i * models by defining semantic, pragmatic and social metrics. As a result, we obtain suites of metrics that can be applied to i * goaloriented requirements models. This theoretical work is put into practice by using iStarML, a XML representation of i * models, over which XQuery sentences compute the proposed metrics.