From Goal-Achievement to the Maintenance of Relationships: Extending Business Process Models with Homeostasis and Appreciation
Résumé
We use homeostasis, the maintenance of steady states in an
organism, to explain some of the decisions made by participants in a business
process. We use Vickers’s Appreciative System to model the homeostatic states
with Harel’s statecharts. We take the example of a PhD recruitment process
formally defined between a faculty member, a graduate student candidate and a
doctoral school. Our analysis uncovers some hidden process scenarios. As a
result, these scenarios can be integrated into the process model and eventually
taken into account by the process supporting software.