Collaborative maintenance of business process models

Enterprise modelling helps improving individual and organisational self-awareness by allowing sharing knowledge about the organisation among its human actors through graphical representations. In order to achieve this goal, enterprise models must not only offer a trustworthy and reliable representation of different enterprise concerns, but such representation must be up-to-date. The work presented in this paper defines a collaborative ‘as-is’ business process model updating process that uses the annotation mechanism to create interaction contexts and enable business actors to communicate their knowledge about organisational processes turning it explicit and to discuss existing process representations in order to update them. The proposed approach allows actors to act as active updaters and modellers of the as-is business process model by comparing modelled with actually executed activities. The benefits of this approach have been gathered through several case studies in real organisational environment where a collaborative enterprise modelling tool was deployed to support the defined process.