S-bpm as a new impetus in Business process Management: a survey

Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) is a relatively new approach for the overall handling of work procedures in organizations, from analysis to IT-based execution. It focuses on the acting entities in processes (people, software, robots etc.) and their interactions to achieve the process goal. The explicit stakeholder and communication orientation makes it a promising candidate to overcome the major drawbacks of traditional BPM, as there are deviations of lived processes from their specification (model-reality divide), giving away opportunities for improvement proposed by employees (lost innovation) and slow adaption of organization and IT to changing requirements. With its easy-to-understand and easy-to-use notation based on the Subject-Predicate-Object scheme of natural language, S-BPM facilitates semantic and organizational integration of people in the design of their work procedures. On the other hand, clear formal semantic behind the graphical notation allows automatic code generationfor workflow execution at runtime. Hence, stakeholders can instantly test the models they created, and iteratively improve and complete them until they are considered ready for going live and being executed by a workflow engine. This leads to seamless roundtrip engineering based on a common understanding of both business and IT people, so it can significantly increase organizational agility. The article first briefly explains the properties of the S-BPM approach, and then details their impact on the BPM lifecycle activities, with regard to improving stakeholder participation and BPM lifecycle responsiveness.