What Roles Do Decisions Play In Context-Aware Business Process Management?

Recently, Business Process Management (BPM) is moving towards the separation of concerns paradigm by externalizing the decisions from the process flow. Most notably, the introduction of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard provides a solution and technique to model decisions and the process flow separately and consistently integrated. In the area of context-aware BPM, decisions are still considered within business processes in a traditional way. In this paper, we examine how context affects business processes at design time and at run time. Different types of decisions influence the context-aware effect on business processes in their own way. Through analyzing these effects, we have observed that decisions play key roles in the ecosystem of context-aware BPM, including identifying the need of context-awareness, anticipating possible context-dependent variants and the contextualization of a business process. We also examine the opportunity to apply the DMN technique in context-aware BPM.