Enabling End-User Driven Business Process Composition Through Programming by Example in a Collaborative Task Management System

Letting end users tailor business processes can result in business process management support, which is better turned to userspsila needs and organizational changes. However, such tailoring requires not only the userspsila domain expertise but also advanced skills in computer use, which business users mostly lack. The paper presents the design of the collaborative task manager (CTM) prototype which overcomes this limitation and enables end users to become informed participants in business process composition. CTM uses enterprise-wide ldquoprogramming by examplerdquo by exposing common functionalities for personal task management to the end users and tracking their activities to generate end-to-end process execution examples on a central instance. These can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal process models, which enables tailoring as collaboration between business users, end-user tailors and developers. The paper finally reports on trial usage of the tool at a partner company.