Generating Domain-Specific Process Studios

Typical business process management studios provide support for process design through generic languages such as BPMN. This brings several shortcomings related to process governance over time, process ambiguity and complexity for non-technical users. Domain-specific process languages have the potential to correct these issues but they require strong enterprise tool support and integration in order to be successfully adopted. This paper proposes a mechanism for generating intuitive yet feature-rich graphical process studios for various business domains that are fully integrated with standard business process management solutions. It reduces the need for costly development and maintenance of such studios while ensuring that business users have consistent access to the ever-evolving enterprise body of knowledge. The approach uses model-based transformations to generate and support the entire infrastructure required by the studios. This includes the graphical user interface, the conversion capabilities to and from BPMN, embedding of real-time monitoring data from business process engines and service oriented platforms, live multi-user collaboration support, process governance and evolution, domain know-how management, as well as service-level agreement monitoring. The approach has been fully prototyped and integrated with enterprise-level tools and platforms.