  Business process management systems from various vendors are used by
companies around the globe. Most of these systems allow for the full or partial
automation of business processes by ensuring that tasks and data are presented
to the right person at the right time during process execution. However, almost
all established BPMS employ the activity-centric process support paradigm, in
which the various forms, i.e., the main way for users to input data into the
process, have to be created by hand. Furthermore, traditional activity-centric
process management systems are limited in their flexibility as all possible
execution variants have to be taken into account by the process modeler.
Therefore, large amounts of research have gone into developing alternative
process support paradigms, with a large focus on enabling more flexibly
executable processes. This article takes one of these paradigms, object-aware
process management, and presents the concepts we developed while researching
the possibility of bringing the power and flexibility of non-activity-centric
process support paradigms to the people that matter: the end-users working with
the processes. The contribution of this article are the concepts, ideas, and
lessons learned during the development and evaluation of the PHILharmonicFlows
runtime user interface, which allows for the generation of an entire user
interface, complete with navigation and forms, based on an object-aware process
model. This novel approach allows for the generation of entire information
systems, complete with data storage, process logic, and now fully functional
user interfaces in a fully generic fashion from data-centric object-aware
process models.
