The sign of our time is the amazing speed with which changes in the business world happen. This requires from the enterprises of today, and even more of the future to become agile, e.g. capable of adjusting themselves to changes in the surrounding world.

Agility requires focus being moved from optimization to collaboration and creativity. At the same time, current process thinking is continuing to be preoccupied with the issue of optimizing performance through standardization, specialization, and automation. A focus on optimization has resulted in the workflow view (in which a process is considered as a flow of operations) emerging as predominant in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). Besides requiring a long time to develop, predefined sequence of events in a workflow can reduce the creativity of people participating in the process and thereby result in poor effectiveness (doing the right thing) while formally achieving higher efficiency (doing things right). According to the modern organizational science such combination of effectiveness/efficiency might lead to the “die quickly” result:

efficiency_effectivenessMoving focus to collaboration and creativity requires a paradigm shift in BPM that is already happening in practice. This, for example, can be seen in appearing a strong practical movement called Adaptive Case Management (ACM) which “.. is information technology that exposes structured and unstructured business information (business data and content) and allows structured (business) and unstructured (social) organizations to execute work (routine and emergent processes) in a secure but transparent manner.” (http://www.xpdl.org/nugen/p/adaptive-case-management/public.htm)


Goal
While practitioners are trying to overcome the restrictions of workflow thinking, the research on the topic is somewhat lagging. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss theoretical and practical problems and solutions in the area of non-workflow based approaches to BPM in general, and ACM (as a leading movement) in particular. This workshop is aimed to promote new, non-traditional ways of modelling and controlling business processes, the ones that promote and facilitate collaboration and creativity in the frame of business processes.

Topics:
We strongly encourage the submissions reporting a synergy of innovative research and best practices in the area of ACM and other non-workflow approaches to BPM, including state-oriented BPM, human-centric BPM, data-centric BPM, artifact-centric BPM, knowledge-driven BPM, etc. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

1. What are essential characteristics and application area for Adaptive Case Management. What “adaptive” stays for? In what ways Adaptive Case Management differs from Case Management and other techniques used for running business processes.

2. Analysis of situations where workflow-based systems do not fit; reports on real-life cases where it has been revealed

3. Theoretical views on business processes not based on the workflow that can serve as a scientific basis for ACM, and other non-workflow software systems/services that help process participants to run their processes

4. Non-workflow based process modeling languages, and methodologies that can be used in connection to development of ACM systems

5. Comparative analysis of ACM vs Workflow-based systems and practices

6. Usage of ACM and other non-workflow techniques in practice: Case studies and Experience reports

7. Critical analysis of ACM state of the art (tools and practices) that reveals challenges to overcome

8. Comparative analysis of tools and applications that support ACM

9. Level of automation achievable in ACM that does not convert ACM into workflow