People-Oriented Enterprise Information Systems

Current notations and languages do not emphasize the participation of users in business processes and consider them essentially as service providers. Moreover, they follow a centralized approach as all the interactions originate from or end in a business process; direct interactions between users cannot be represented. What is missing from this approach is that human work is cooperative and cooperation takes place through structured interactions called conversations; the notion of conversation is at the center of the language/action perspective. However, the problem of effectively integrating conversations and business processes is still open and this chapter proposes a notation called POBPN (People-Oriented Business Process Notation) and a perspective, referred to as conversation-oriented perspective, for its solution.