Enhancing the agility in business processes through context-based modeling

Business processes are an essential asset of enterprises and must be supported by IT systems. A problem of today´s business automated processes is that these processes are too rigid to accommodate changing business demands. This problem is more apparent especially when the processes are complex in nature and long in a process´s cycle time. A solution to overcome this problem is to extract business logics out of processes and manage them in a suitable and flexible way. In this paper we present a context-based approach for process modeling to enable the design of processes that will adapt to changes. In our approach contexts are treated as basic logic units within which actions are accommodated and norms are attached to. We design a system to illustrate our ideas by the case of clinical pathways.