Handling dynamic schema change in process models

Workflow technology has emerged as an appropriate platform for consolidating the distributed information resources of an enterprise, promoting interoperability across cross-platform systems and for providing a global view and understanding of business process models. However, the business processes that workflows represent, are dynamic by nature, that is, they encounter frequent and unavoidable changes. It is through this dynamism that organizations maintain their competitive edge. Workflow technology to date does not provide sufficient support for dynamically changing processes. Managing schema change of workflow processes with multiple active instances is a complex issue. In this paper, we present an analysis of workflow changes in relation to business process change, and present a classification of workflow changes that dictate the scope of the problem. Based on this classification we lay the foundation for a generic framework to support dynamically changing workflow processes