Enforcement vs. freedom of action. An integrated approach to flexible workflow enactment

The advantages of today's process management, such as efficiency and quality aspects, are achieved by enforcing detailed models of work processes. However, real world processes can be planned to a limited degree only and sometimes planned parts of the process must be changed, creating a need for additional, unforeseen activities. In this paper, this contradictory situation is tackled by an approach that combines different forms of enforcement of planned parts of a process. The explicit modelling of these different support strategies allows them to be changed if demanded by the situation. An extended enactment strategy gives workers the opportunity to negotiate about changing the current support strategy, giving scope for deviations from the planned process where additional actions are required.