Organizations are struggling to choose from or combine the different business process management paradigms offered in today's BPM landscape, such as workflow management, dynamic case management and straight through processing. The field of declarative processes seems to be able to address this challenge by offering a unified approach to business process modeling, providing variable amounts of flow at execution time and different levels of autonomy to the actors based on models using a single formalism. The notion of declarativity in business processes seems to be ill defined and is often treated as a black and white distinction. However, a number of quite different formalisms have been developed that are broadly agreed to be declarative. This paper proposes a number of qualitative characteristics to characterize the declarative nature of process modeling formalisms. The characteristics are evaluated by applying them to a number of relevant process modeling formalisms, both imperative and declarative, and we discuss how these characteristics can be utilized to create business processes that offer activity flows that are known up front where needed, and allow ad hoc approaches to offer experts freedom and to support impediment driven approaches in an STP context.
Business innovation is a multidisciplinary area of expertise that bridges the gap between traditional areas of study such as business administration, organizational studies, marketing, design, engineering and entrepreneurship. Business innovation focuses on creating, accelerating and managing new and sustainable business models through innovation (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010; Keeley, Walters, Pikkel, and Quinn, 2013).
Decisions and business rules are essential Components of an organization. Combined, these components form a basis for securing the implementation of new laws, regulations and internal policies into processes, work instructions and information systems. To ensure proper implementation, business rule types must be taken into account, as the functions per type may be different. The current body of knowledge on decision and business rule management offers some insights into different types of business rules, however, these types are often presented as a secondary focus of a contribution or set in stone without proper evidence supporting these claims. This study therefore aims to explore the different business rule types utilized in the body of knowledge as well as practice. This will form a basis to determine possible overlap and inconsistencies and aid in establishing the functional differences between the defined business rule types. By applying a literature review, semi-structured interviews and secondary data analysis, we observed that the current body of knowledge shows serious diffusion with regards to business rule types, the same holds for practice. Therefore, future research should focus to research these differences in detail with the aim to harmonize the proliferation of business rule types.
