The next aspect of BPM and traditionally a very strong one is process enactment.
However, before process enactment is discussed, we provide a coarse
classification of business processes that paves the way for a discussion of different
types of process enactment systems. In the early days of BPM when in
the application side business process modeling and in the IT enactment side
workflow management were the only options, processes with a static structure
were focused. The main reason behind this obvious limitation was as follows:
Modeling a process and providing infrastructure for its enactment incurs considerable
effort. To provide satisfactory return on investment, a large number of
individual cases have to benefit from this new technology. This type of straightthrough-process
is also called production workflow [23]. While there are successful
workflow projects on this type of straight-through processes, this restriction
of workflow technology proved fatal for applications in more dynamic environments.
In some cases where traditional workflow technology was used in these
advanced settings, new workflow solutions were partly circumvented or even neglected.
As a response to this situation, considerable work in ad-hoc, flexible
and case-based workflow was (and is being) conducted, both in academia and
in industry. Recently, case handling is studied in depth as a new paradigm for
supporting knowledge-intensive business processes with loose structuring. Based
on the brief characterization of case handling provided above, we mention that in
the case handling paradigm knowledge workers enjoy a great degree of freedom
in organizing and performing their work which they are knowledgeable about.
Some of the concepts of case handling are already present in commercial case
handling systems.