For a long time, structured business processes (e.g., the ones of public administrations, of financial institutions, etc.) have been the main subject of workflow related research. However, in recent years, the maturity of process management methodologies has led to the application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging, knowledge-intensive and dynamic scenarios, such as healthcare, emergency management, coordination of large projects, etc.
In these working environments, most business functions involve collaborative features and unstructured processes that do not have the same level of predictability as the routine structured work. In this talk, we discuss some recent research techniques we developed during the last years that may complement or extend the existing state of the art: the discovery of artful processes, the automated adaptation of dynamic processes at runtime, the representation and enactment, with formal guarantees, of data-centric processes.