Though the concept of shared spaces had been known in Groupware and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) for quite a while, it did not become popular until the arrival of the Internet and social software. Implicitly, the concept of shared spaces has penetrated many IT-areas, including the area of Business Process Management. Though shared spaces are used in many systems and tools, like Google Drive and Projectplace, there is a lack of research investigating this usage in a generic way. The article aims to fill this gap by introducing a generic model of a Business Process Support (BPS) system based on shared space that supports the comparison, analysis and design of BPS systems. In addition, the article goes in more details on one design issue – the structuring of shared spaces. This is done by analyzing and comparing two different BPS systems that exploit the concept of shared spaces, though implicitly. These systems use different approaches to shared space structuring. The first one organizes the information by grouping similar types of items without regard to the flow of activities in a business process, while the other organizes the information around groups of activities that are usually completed as a block. Which model to choose in a particular situation depends on the characteristics of the business process and its participants. In order to facilitate this choice, the article offers a number of guidelines derived from the experience of using the two BPS systems in practice. The article also discusses in what circumstances BPS systems with shared spaces are preferable to traditional workflow BPS systems.

Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling (AO-BPM) aims to support this separation through a new form of encapsulation technique. Although different researchers have investigated how these models can be designed to support separation of non-retroactive cross-cutting concerns, there is no study that defines the separation of retroactive ones. The lack of a unified definition of the syntax and the operational semantics for these models hinders their enactment in practice as well. As a result, the perceived usefulness and usability of these approaches have not yet been investigated so far. Thus, this article fills this gap by formalizing an AO-BPM language and the semantics that can support enactment of such models. The semantics is validated through the state-space analysis technique, and the feasibility of the implementation is also demonstrated. The perceived usefulness and easy to use of the AO-BPM is evaluated by applying the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and easy to use.

Despite the importance, the methodological standards for business process modeling are still very much insufficient. One of the most important aspects which must be covered with the process models is essential unity of object oriented and process oriented views of a business system. To achieve such unity, this article introduces a process normalization technique as part of the Methodology for Modeling and Analysis of Business Processes (MMABP). This technique is freely inspired by the famous 'ancient' Normalization of Data Structures technique which we regard as relevant and correct because of the essential unity of objects and processes in the business system. At the same time it can be seen that harmonizing the structure of processes with the (conceptual) structure of the Real World directly fulfills the objective. The goal of this article is to illustrate the steps of process normalization with examples. Important connected problems of structural algorithmic thinking, as well as other ways of manifesting the previously mentioned essential object-processes unity in the business system, are also discussed in the article.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between task characteristics, business intelligence (BI) quality, and task compatibility. It is essential to investigate this relationship, as BI often builds up data from the organization's existing information systems, and thus, is a supplement. In addition, there is a gap within existing research about task characteristics and BI. We conducted a survey of three companies, where 104 BI end users answered the questionnaire. Our findings reveal that BI users who experience high information quality solve difficult tasks, have a specified job, and their task solution is independent of others experiencing higher task compatibility. The main contribution of the survey is a better understanding of how tasks and BI fit together. In conclusion, the model could be tested in different industries and with different information systems.

Modeling is an important contribution to dealing with complexity in development and engineering processes. A model is a generalized representation of a piece of reality, with only those real‐world properties included which are relevant to the purpose of modelling. Models don’t remove the complexity of the real world but help to understand it and to design and develop solutions. All articles in this issue are in some respect concerned with models or modelling.The articles in this issue also reflect recent trends in industry and society, such as digitization and industry 4.0, and show that these trends will not necessarily reduce complexity in systems but rather require the combination of proven approaches, such as modelling, and new methods for managing this complexity.

Eliminating the gap between business and IT within an enterprise, i.e., solving the problem of Business and IT Alignment (BITA), requires an instrument for the multidimensional analysis of an enterprise. Enterprise Modeling (EM) is a practice that supports such analysis and therefore can be used to facilitate BITA. EM serves as a tool that can capture, visualize and analyze different aspects of enterprises. This article presents a framework that describes the role of EM in the context of BITA and presents recommendations in EM for BITA.

Analyzing, designing and implementing software systems based on the concept of capabilities have several benefits, such as the ability to design efficient monitoring of capabilities and their execution context. Today, there exist new model-driven methods and development tools that support capability-based analysis, design, and implementation. However, there are also a plethora of existing efficient development tools that are currently in use by organizations. In this article, we examine how a new set of capability based tools, the Capability Driven Development (CDD) environment, can be combined with model-driven development tools to leverage both novel capability-based functionality and the proven functionality of existing tools. We base the examination on a case study where an existing model-driven tool is combined with the CDD environment.

In business process modeling the de facto standard BPMN has emerged. However, the applications of this notation have many subsets of elements and various extensions. Also, BPMN still coincides with many other modeling languages, forming a large set of available options for business process modeling languages and dialects. While, in general, the goal of modelers is a central notion in the choice of modeling languages and notations, in most researches that propose guidelines, techniques, and methods for business process modeling language evaluation and/or selection, the business process modeling goal is not formalized and not transparently taken into account. To overcome this gap, and to explicate and help to handle business process modeling complexity, the approach to formalize the business process modeling goal, and the supporting three dimensional business process modeling framework, are proposed.