Multi-channel provisioning of public services - Department of ...

Business modelling and process support
New approaches for supporting operational processes include Case Handling (CH) and
Straight Through Processing (STP) (van der Aalst et al., 2003). STP aims, at an early
stage, to separate out process instances that can be processed straight through without
intervention from the human actor, thus achieving efficient operations and improved
response times. CH implies that cases are unfit to model in a process definition
(possibly caused by ambiguity, complexity, or diversity of cases and decision points). A
central motivation for the CH paradigm is rooted in the blind surgeon metaphor (van
der Aalst et al., 2005), where context information is limited to the task at hand, and
further prevents the holistic treatment of a single case controlled by the prescribed chain
of activities and corresponding accepted inputs.
Figure 8 CPI cycle adapted from Lillehagen and Krogstie (2008)
In considering a national e-service infrastructure as process-aware support system for
public services, Houy et al. (2010) points to some trends relevant for a large-scale BPM
service environment:
1. Processes are increasingly interconnected and it makes limited sense to look at a
single process in isolation,
2. The number of processes an organisation has to cope with is rapidly increasing
(large organisations have hundreds of processes which need to be managed),
3. Modern technology is generating unprecedented streams of event data representing
the states of different processes (sensor data, RFID data, remote logging, remote
services etc.) and,
4. Different devices are used to access the information system in different situations
necessitating a flexible multi-channel support influencing which parts of the
workflow are available in which manner depending on the context of use.
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