Versions to Address Business Process Flexibility Issue

Abstract

This paper contributes to address an important issue in business process management: the Business Process (BP) flexibility issue. First, it defends that versions are an interesting solution to deal with both a priori (when designing BPs) and a posteriori (when executing BPs) flexibility. It also explains why previous contributions about versions of BPs are incomplete, and need to be revisited. Then, the paper presents a meta-model for BP versions, which combines five perspectives -the functional, process, informational, organizational and operation perspectives- for BP modelling, and which allows a comprehensive description of versionalized BPs.