Stakeholder-centered Process Implementation: Assessing S-BPM Tool Support

1. Since the introduction of Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) several support tools have been developed. Due to the increased volatility of work environments and organizing them, more and more stakeholders need not only to deal with process models, but also with process execution engines. S-BPM claims intuitive modeling as well as non-disruptive execution capability of process models. Hence, stakeholders could expect from S-BPM tools effective and efficient support: Specifying work processes, refining, validating, and executing them should be supported in a non-disruptive way. In this paper, we challenged three existing S-BPM tools. We wanted to know the development effort required for generating prototypical applications, given stakeholder-centered specifications. We have selected a commercially available suite, a tool currently approaching the market, and a research tool. Our assessment study reveals substantial effort stakeholders need to spend refining and validating their initial process models, before they are able to generate an interactive experience. The findings should encourage (S-)BPM tool developers to rethink support features for stakeholders with respect to effective and efficient process engineering.