Inverse workflows for supporting agile business process management

Abstract

Agile processes allow organizations to flexibly react on new and unforeseen situations. However, modifications must adhere to the standards and quality requirements given by an organization. In this paper, the concept of inverse workflows is presented to support organizations in meeting this goal. Inverse workflows provide a means to explicitly express unwanted procedures and work situations. In conjunction with an automated system to detect inverse workflow enactment, organizations can prevent undesired developments while they are emerging. This effectively allows controlling overall process quality while modeling or adapting business process to stakeholder demand.