From Data-centric Business Processes to Enterprise Process Frameworks

Conceptual elevation of data in business process modeling was first formulated in 2003. The research community responded to this new idea enthusiastically. In the past decade, there have been numerous research activities concerning the interactions between business processes/activities and data in many aspects of business process management. Many of the advancements have or will have impacted on design/modeling, analysis, implementation of business processes in practice. However, there is still a lack of techniques for developing a suite of "interrelated" processes realizing a business service. Interrelated processes are a cluster of processes that share data and other resources, are collectively constrained by regulations and policies, influence KPIs as a group. Many current practical applications of business workflow systems are in urgent need for tools and techniques for process clusters. In this paper, we formulate a broad notion of an "Enterprise Process Framework" (EPF) to address this need and outline several interesting research challenges arising from EPFs.