Advanced business process modelling support for collaborative interorganizational environments

Interorganizational collaboration in virtual enterprises is based on dynamic requirements and agile organizational setups. Business processes need to address these constraints both on the design-time (setup and modelling of business) and run-time perspective (operation/execution of business). The ComVantage project addressed both aspects. Whereas the modelling part is described below, the execution aspect is described in result #6. To enable the mapping of different business process models for interorganizational collaboration, a hybrid method for enterprise modelling was introduced, considering the technological specificity of ComVantage, i.e. mobile apps front-end, and Linked Data back-end. It enables the modelling and analysis of interorganizational business processes in relation to their execution environment, as well as required or available capabilities (see also result #3). The metamodel, which allows to model business processes with semantic query-able links to their enterprise context, was implemented in two tools. While the open source OMI prototype (as described in result #3) provides a subset of on demand model types the commercial Business Modelling Tool ADOLog supports complex requirements and a comprehensive integration of the ComVantage modelling method. It offers a holistic and professional modelling environment to model processes, assign responsibilities, attach external documentation, etc. and also analyse and export documentation to other formats. This can be further extended to additional needs by customizing (metamodel extension, new functionalities, etc.). Such customizations are offered as professional services, are very flexible and powerful and do not require editing the source code of the tool. Thus, business process modelling for complex and agile environments gets facilitated by featuring rich configuration and customization capabilities instead of complex integration and adaptation of tools.