Automated Resource Assignment in BPMN Models Using RACI Matrices

Abstract

Organizations need to manage the responsibility of their employees with respect to all the activities that are daily carried out within them. Process-oriented organizations need to do it, in addition, in accordance to the business processes their members participate in. However, powerful mechanisms to manage responsibility in combination with business processes are missing in current modelling notations, usually limited to indicating who is in charge of undertaking the activities. RACI matrices, on the contrary, were specifically conceived to provide responsibility management information. They enable the specification of the level of responsibility each human resource has with regard to each activity carried out in a company, ranging from the performer of the work to the resource that must approve it or receive certain notifications. In this paper, we propose the use of RACI matrices together with business process models to manage human resource responsibilities in processes. Focused on a concrete type of RACI matrices, called RASCI, we introduce a novel approach to automatically generate a BPMN model with RASCI information given a BPMN model that does not handle resources, and a RASCI matrix. The resulting model is BPMN-compliant and, thus, it is ready to be executed in existing business process management systems. With this approach, the assignment of responsibilities and the management of processes can be designed separately, while being executed together.

This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER), Spanish Government under project SETI (TIN2009-07366); and projects THEOS (TIC-5906) and ISABEL (TIC-2533) funded by the Andalusian Local Government.