Change patterns and change support features – Enhancing flexibility in process-aware information systems

Companies increasingly adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs), which offerpromising perspectives for more flexible enterprise computing. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing approachesenabling PAIS changes have made the selection of adequate process management technologydifficult. This paper suggests a set of 18 change patterns and seven change support featuresto foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology inrespect to process change support. While the proposed patterns are all based on empirical evidence from several large case studies, the suggested change support features constitute typical functionalities provided by flexible PAISs. Based on the proposed change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected approaches fromboth academia and industry. The presented work will not only facilitate the selection of technologies for realizing flexible PAISs, but can also be used as a reference for implementing flexible PAISs