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Subject orientation, as introduced in (Fleischmann et al. 2012), aims for contextual design of socio-economic and socio-technical systems primarily from an interaction perspective. The S-BPM (Subject-oriented Business Process Management) modeling language reflects the trend towards semantic specification and processing. Although S-BPM is a domain-independent approach, each application is case-sensitive, even when validated models can be executed automatically, thus enabling seamless roundtrip engineering. Infrastructures, in terms of both organizational and technical characteristics, such as project-like organization of work, service-oriented architectures and cloud computing, need to be integrated along each life cycle.

Successful companies use business processes for the transfer of long-term strategies in operational workflows. The modeling approach presented in this chapter shows how strategic objectives of a company can be combined with the S-BPM modeling notation. The new modeling approach is used in two case studies. First, redesign rules for the strategic optimization of workflow models are demonstrated in the case of the customer support processes of an international enterprise. A second case study introduces a company-wide monitoring system through the example of the product development process of a multinational company from Germany.

This field study embodies S-BPM into organizational development processes, both methodologically, exploring how to capture work knowledge, and with respect to implementation, providing accurate specifications for process support. Eliciting and acquiring knowledge of work procedures have been exploited by means of Value Network Analysis (VNA). It engages stakeholders on elaborating by scenarios of work they have experienced and supports exploring opportunities of change in terms of exchanged deliverables along actor-specific communication structures. VNA roles correspond to subjects and interactional transactions to business objects. The approach has become part of an SOP for organizational development of clinics. We exemplify the development of patient-critical treatment planning in the University Clinic for Radiotherapy-Radiation Oncology.

IT Service consumers have a clear idea of agile, flexible and transparent service processes to quickly get their needs satisfied. For an IT service provider like WK EDV GmbH this arises the challenge of designing its procedures adequately. For that reason WK decided to consolidate and optimize their service processes. It ran a pilot project to analyze, redesign and newly implement the software deployment process which is part of their overall Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process. The project team applied Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) as methodology and the Metasonic Suite as the respective software toolset in order to gain insights into and experience with the S-BPM environment. This contribution reports on the course of the project, the results and the learnings.

The various perspectives on how requirements for a process-developing IT application are described have led to the long-standing challenge of business IT alignment. For BPM (Business Process Management) modeling at Fiducia for many years, employees in the business departments have been able to compile large, complex processes by involving experts. Such models are not focused on the point of view of each individual employee involved but on the process as a whole. Consequently, the specification is coarse-grained to such an extent that an identification of the employees with a model and how they effectively work along a process cannot be achieved. Moreover, the superficial examination does not allow deriving guidelines for implementing an IT solution based on coarse-grained models. Introducing S-BPM brings the point of view of the individual employee to the center of describing processes. It thereby enables describing how processes actually run from his/her point of view. We have used this capability to empower the employees of the business departments to carry out this description task (modeling) themselves. Based on a sample project, which also includes integrating SAP as a database, I shall describe the difference between the “traditional” approaches to BPM and S-BPM. Since both approaches were used in this project, the benefits can be described precisely. The savings in Euro and time (earlier availability) represent an important factor here besides the quality of the description. By considering the details of the process, the quality of the description is significantly increased, and, last but not least, the identification of the employees in the business departments with their models, who finally were able to create applications by themselves.

The services offered by the management consultancy Detecon International GmbH include the support of its clients during digital transformation. One of the major pillars in the design of digital transformation is process digitalization, i.e., the consistent and complete automation and integration of processes. The author reports here on a fictitious client project which he has created on the basis of his experience from a large range of similar, real projects. The objective of the client project is the subject-oriented design of a core process digitalized completely and consistently on this basis. The necessity of digital transformation gave rise to our client’s requirement for a consistent design and complete digitalization of the process for contract performance. At the same time, the contract performance implemented in a large ERP system was to be made more flexible. Despite that, the process was to be implemented in such a way that it relieved work pressures on personnel and reduced the time for billing cycles. The requirement was realized by separating the process logic from the ERP system and putting it in a dedicated process layer. Simultaneously, the ERP system was established as a data-carrying layer. The two were connected via an integration layer in which the Web services were located. The process layer was designed by the workers involved in the process on a subject-oriented basis so that the processes were broadly accepted by the business side.

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time-consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Metasonic GmbH has developed a process elicitation tool for their process suite. As part of a research engagement with Metasonic, staff from QUT, Australia have developed a 3D virtual world approach to the same problem, viz. eliciting process models from stakeholders in an intuitive manner. This book chapter tells the story of how QUT staff developed a 3D Virtual World tool for process elicitation and took the outcomes of their research project to Metasonic for evaluation, and of Metasonic’s response to the initial proof of concept.

Processes are an important part of every organization’s value creation and therefore have to be executed in the most effective and efficient way. Process Analyses are a first step of Business Process Management to identify weak spots and potential improvements within processes. Even a rough documentation of processes in a graphical way, a so-called process model, raises process awareness and transparency for all involved parties. However, it is not as common as one might think that an organization has all processes documented in a complete and up-to-date form or documented at all. In reality even existing process models might not properly reflect the executed processes because the involved process actors are not part of the process survey. And even if they are involved, the complexity of most modeling notations and their respective tools can have a deterrent and overwhelming effect on the user. For executing process surveys we offer a tangible modeling tool that provides a modeling framework and enables even modeling novices to directly model their own part of the process, the S-BPM Buildbook. The method and the notation are based on Subject-oriented Business Process Management and its low complexity of only five symbols. The modeling process itself is completely detached from any kind of software to further lower the complexity and instruction time and to increase intuitiveness. We are aware that for process management steps, like a detailed analysis, documentation or implementation, some kind of software support is required. For this a recognition algorithm was developed that converts the tangible process model into a digital form as a generic XML file. The XML file can then be imported into the software tool in use. Two case studies were executed to examine the S-BPM Buildbook. The first case study evaluates the tool regarding its intuitiveness and usability to describe real-life processes. The second case study compares the time needed for instructions and the actual modeling process while using the S-BPM Buildbook, with a pen and paper approach.

Effective maintenance has become increasingly important the last few decades. Competition is increasing because of globalization. Therefore, production is confronted with increasing requirements. In particular, machinery and plants have to produce faster and in greater volume. Nowadays, the high availability of equipment is a prerequisite to compete. In recent decades, maintenance has become its own business area. The Lean Management method Total Productive Management (TPM) provides a guideline for effective maintenance. The maintenance process itself is not adequately described in the literature. However, it is an efficient means of addressing unplanned maintenance tasks. This is the reason for creating a reference model for the maintenance process that can be implemented in companies. The process model is described using the language of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM). This process language meets the requirements of TPM and maintenance experts. S-BPM is a communication system which focuses on the individual actors. Furthermore, the message flow of the communication is displayed to provide a structured and clear understanding of messages required within the reference model. The reference model created was verified by maintenance and S-BPM experts and is seen as a positive and important development in the field of maintenance. It is also pointed out that this reference model needs to be customized for every customer. Then it facilitates responding to customer requirements.

Role and rights management of today’s IT landscape is a challenging task that causes problems concerning the redundancy of organizational knowledge. This knowledge is the basis for specifying access rights and task assignment. As a consequence, the widespread technological methods are prone to inconsistencies on organizational changes, such as employees leaving, joining or moving within the organization. For this purpose, an approach is needed that offers both a comprehensive organizational meta-model and a declarative organization query language. The central meta-model helps to partially overcome the redundancy problem. In conjunction with the organization query language, the problems caused by redundancy is minimized. A query language expression describes formally characteristics of agents that are assigned to access rights, or tasks. Accordingly, this new approach uses a approach instead of as required by other approaches. Thus, query expressions stay unmodified even if the organization changes.