The contribution of process management to a continuous engineering of office applications

A systematic management of business processes is considered to be one approach that contributes to a continuous engineering of software systems. Management of business processes means on the one hand side the proper definition, analysis and improvement of business processes, thus yielding in improved process oriented business organizations. On the other hand it means the process oriented design and implementation of the IT-systems. One enabling technology supporting a process oriented IT-development is the workflow technology. There are a couple of workflow management systems available on the market that support this paradigm. However, in many cases there are several problems that hinder the proper development of workflow based applications. Among these problems are the legacy problem and the data problem. Furthermore, workflow management systems that are available today still lack some concepts for exception handling and ad hoc modifications. With respect to this issue concepts for la te modelling of processes and concepts for a flexible process model configuration are sketched. Furthermore, a classification scheme distinguishing different classes of processes is shown.