An Aspect Architecture for Modeling Organizational Controls in Workflow Systems

Abstract

Abstract Besides business objectives, organizations have control goals concerning how these objectives are met. To achieve the control goals, organizations usually add controls into their business processes (workflows, in automated form). Over time, controls pile up and tangle with other activities, making it difficult to manage and re-engineer evolving processes. In this paper, we propose an architecture that enables separating the control aspects of a process from the operational activities. The proposed aspect architecture improves the flexibility of business process design to incorporate changes in controls and minimize the side-effects of such changes. Key words: Organizational control, internal control, business process, process modeling, workflow modeling. INTRODUCTION Design science is about the design and invention of new methods, processes and systems. As applied to business processes this includes methods and techniques to help designers not only to create new business processes, but also to re-design them as requirements change. This paper is about facilitating the re-design of business processes. Business process has become a key concern for modern organizations to improve efficiency and effectiveness. A business process comprises a sequence of activities carried out by organizational actors to achieve a business goal. When a business process is automated in whole or in part, it becomes a workflow [1]. Process modeling captures various aspects of a business process and translates them into a process model that can be executed by workflow management systems. Besides business objectives, organizations have control goals to assure that the business objectives will be achieved and undesired events will be prevented or detected and corrected [2]. To achieve control goals, organizations add various controls to their processes. Over time, controls pile up and tangle with other activities. These controls may have overlapping scope and as Lee [3] observed “they grow more easily than they shrink”, making it difficult to design, implement and manage evolving processes. In addition, competitive pressures, as well as regulatory and security factors require that companies provide flexibility in managing controls in their business processes. In this paper, we distinguish two aspects of a business process, the