Managing the complexity of emergent processes

Business processes in knowledge intensive environments often emerge rather than following predefined steps. Such emergence can result in disconnected activities, which result in complex interaction structures that require ways to maintain awareness across the activities and to coordinate the activities to a common goal. The paper suggests that new ways are needed to both model emergent processes and support and manage them using information technologies. The paper describes a metamodel, which includes the commands to create initial processes and to realize emergence. It then describes a prototype system that implements these semantics and realizes the creation of initial structures and their emergence and coordination.