Democratizing Business Process Management: Empowering Process Participants to Contribute to the Enactment of Business Processes

Employee empowerment, meaning among other granting employees discretion to change work processes, has been identified as mean to improve the performance of an organization. Although the involvement of business process participants has been identified as one of the key success factors for BPM projects, end users are typically not participating in the modeling process nor are they involved in the implementation of the modelled processes based on supporting IT systems. Therefore the direct influence of employees on their work processes supported by IT systems is limited. To overcome this limitation this paper presents an agile business process management approach based on a strong involvement of process participants. To foster the involvement we propose a reduced model size and complexity, the iterative enrichment of the process model with exceptional paths and the possibility to migrate process instances to newer process model versions. We show which parts of this proposal are already used today, which additional requirements exist, which available research helps to propose solutions for the open issues and which hypothesis lying beyond our proposal we're planning to test.