Chapter 7. Human Interaction with Business Processes

Business process automation is essential for companies to guarantee their business agility and to increase process transparency, which, as a consequence, leads to operational excellence. As explained in the previous chapters, a holistic business process management (BPM) defines the way to achieve these goals and to ensure the structured automation of companies' end-to-end processes along the delivery chain. One important aspect to gain the most benefit from process automation is to avoid media breaks. Usually, a full automation of business processes is not possible because on dedicated points, a business process needs input from an external human participant. Classic examples for that are approval scenarios. The challenge here is to seamlessly integrate automated business processes and human actors.

This challenge is not new, and in the meanwhile, specifications dealing with the standardization of human integration with...