UML14 — Actors that are outside and inside the system

There is a fundamental problem with the Actor element.
It is defined as
"An Actor models a type of role played by an entity that interacts with the subject
(e.g., by exchanging signals and data), but which is external to the subject."

Now put your modeling focus on a subsystem. Use cases of that subsystem can have
external subsystems as actors. Let A be an actor of a use case. A is an external subsystem.

But now put your modeling focus on the whole system. Now A isn't an actor anymore, but
a subsystem. The same "real world" entity is defined twice in my model: as an actor and
as a subsystem. It depends on my modeling focus, but that's more a topic of the view and
not of the model.

The problem is common in business process modeling. In the BPM view a employee is a
stereotyped class, e.g. business worker. In the system analysis view (for a system
that should support parts of my business processes) the employee is an actor of the system.

We solved that problem by not using actors, but stereotyped classes. But I'm not feel
happy with that solution, because it just a workaround.

Any ideas?

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