Emphasizing User Participation in Business Processes

Modeling business processes is still a challenge as shown by the number of viewpoints proposed in the last years; these viewpoints stress the orchestration of work, the conversations between the participants, the handling of business entities. This paper presents an approach, called PartiM, aimed at emphasizing the participation of users by means of participation models. Users, by looking at their participation models, can clearly understand what their involvement is expected to be, in terms of tasks and decisions. The development of models proceeds in an outside-in manner: first, binary collaboration models are defined, which describe how two parties interact in order to achieve a common goal; then, for each participant, a participation model is produced, which shows how the related collaborations will be handled. Two case studies are presented to exemplify the approach.