On the notion of context for business process use

Abstract

In today's distributed and dynamic business environment companies and their business processes are frequently subject to changes, requiring the ability to continuously evolve business processes in a flexible and dynamic way according to changing external conditions. Taking flexibility as the ability to react to changes by adaptation, it appears appropriate to take the environment, where a change occurs, into account when designing business processes. We propose that the notion of context is key for achieving this objective. Based on a multiperspective analysis we derive a conceptualization of context for business process use that may help to improve the understanding of the notion of context for its integration in BPM.