Business Process Management Workshops

The conscious (re)design of business processes is a powerful means for the improvement of process performance and process conformance. However, despite its popularity and obvious pay-offs, process design is still more art than science. In contrast to the dense academic expertise that has been developed in the area of business process modeling, theoretical sound and empirically validated business process design methodologies are still not available. Many methodologies on this subject remain relatively vague about how to actually derive superior process designs. The practice of business process design tends to largely rely on the creativity of business professionals to come up with new process layouts. However, the lack of a reliable methodology means that the outcomes of such efforts are hard to predict. This is an unsatisfying situation for the academic and practical BPM community as process design plays an essential role in the overall business process lifecycle.

When using process models for automation, correctness of the models is a key requirement. While many approaches concentrate on control flow verification only, correct data flow modeling is of similar importance. This paper introduces an approach for detecting and repairing modeling errors that only occur in the interplay between control flow and data flow. The approach is based on Petri nets and detects anomalies in BPMN models. In addition to the diagnosis of the modeling errors, a subset of errors can also be repaired automatically.

In an enterprise, it is quite common to find related business functions not only in the same domain but also across other domains. However, often these business functions are implemented in isolation primarily because they were developed independent of one another and in the absence of process centric approach towards implementation. In the recent years, developments in business process modeling [3][4] and support for executable syntax for business process models coupled with architectural paradigms like Service oriented architecture (SOA) [1] have made it easier to design and implement reusable process for generic business functions. Many approaches[7][8] have been proposed for identifying and designing common business processes but are limited to designing the Business process model and do not examine the challenges in propagating the same principles on to the implementation. Here, we propose an approach which covers the design & implementation to ensure reuse & flexibility while maintaining the other benefits of cost of ownership.

Despite the increasing maturity of contemporary Workflow Management Systems (WfMS), there still exist numerous process-aware application systems with more or less hard-coded process logic. This does not only cause high maintenance efforts (e.g. costly code adaptions), but also results in hard-coded rules for controlling the access to business processes, business functions, and business data. In particular, the assignment of users to process activities needs to be compliant with the rights granted for executing business functions and for accessing business data. A major reason for not using WfMS in a broader context is the inflexibility provided by their activity-centered paradigm, which also limits the access control strategies offered by them. This position paper discusses key challenges for a process management technology in which processes, data objects and users are well integrated in order to ensure a sufficient degree of flexibility. We denote such technology as

Object-Aware Process Management System

and consider related research as fundamental for the further maturation of process management technology.

Service compositions are a major component to realize service-based applications (SBAs). The design of these service compositions follows mainly a process-modelling approach—an initial business process is refined until it can be executed on a workflow engine. Although this process-modelling approach proved to be useful, it largely disregards the knowledge gained in the requirements engineering discipline, e. g. in eliciting, documenting, managing and tracing requirements. Disregarding the requirements engineering phase may lead to undesired effects of the later service compositions such as lack of acceptance by the later users. To defuse this potentially critical issue we are interested in the interplay between requirements engineering and process modelling techniques. As a first step in this direction, we analyse the current literature in requirements engineering and process modelling in order to find overlaps where the techniques from both domains can be combined in useful ways. Our main finding is that scenario-based approaches from the requirements engineering discipline are a good basis for deriving executable processes. Depending whether the focus is on requirements engineering or on process design the integration of the techniques are slightly different.

Organizations increasingly seek to achieve operational excellence by standardizing business processes. Standardization initiatives may have different purposes, such as process streamlining, process automation, or even process outsourcing. However, standardization of processes is easier said than done. Standardization success depends on various factors, such as existent IT capabilities, available standard frameworks, market situation, and the processes’ nature, such as their level of routine or structuredness. This paper uncovers the complex nature and relative influence of process-internal and -environmental factors relevant to process standardization, by discussing three case studies from different industries. The findings are summarized in a set of initial conjectures about successful process standardization. This exploratory research is a first step towards uncovering the characteristics of successful process standardization efforts.

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is an area that is quickly gaining interest and importance in industry and research. BPI refers to the application of various measurement and analysis techniques in the area of business process management. In practice, BPI is embodied in tools for managing process execution quality by offering several features such as analysis, prediction, monitoring, control, and optimization.

It is vital to use accurate models for the analysis, design, and/or control of business processes. Unfortunately, there are often important

discrepancies between reality and models

. In earlier work, we have shown that simulation models are often based on incorrect assumptions and one example is the speed at which people work. The “Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal” suggests that a worker that is under time pressure may become more efficient and thus finish tasks faster. However, if the pressure is too high, then the worker’s performance may degrade. Traditionally, it was difficult to investigate such phenomena and few analysis tools (e.g., simulation packages) support workload-dependent behavior. Fortunately, more and more activities are being recorded and modern

process mining

techniques provide detailed insights in the way that people really work. This paper uses a new process mining plug-in that has been added to ProM to explore the

effect of workload on service times

. Based on historic data and by using regression analysis, the relationship between workload and services time is investigated. This information can be used for various types of analysis and decision making, including more realistic forms of simulation.

In this work we introduce a new generalization of the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem – the Mobile Workforce Scheduling Problem with Multitask-Processes (MWSP-MP). This scheduling problem arises in mobile work scenarios and is characterized by tasks to be scheduled that are not independent from each other, but belong to structured business processes. These business processes are subject to timing and cost related properties and restrictions that have to be considered for the scheduling of resources. We fortify the relevance of the MWSP-MP by illustration with process examples from the utility industry and present an initial heuristic for the insertion of processes into solutions of the problem.

The goal of process mining is to discover process models from event logs. However, for processes that are not well structured and have a lot of diverse behavior, existing process mining techniques generate highly complex models that are often difficult to understand; these are called spaghetti models. One way to try to understand these models is to divide the log into clusters in order to analyze reduced sets of cases. However, the amount of noise and ad-hoc behavior present in real-world logs still poses a problem, as this type of behavior interferes with the clustering and complicates the models of the generated clusters, affecting the discovery of patterns. In this paper we present an approach that aims at overcoming these difficulties by extracting only the useful data and presenting it in an understandable manner. The solution has been implemented in ProM and is divided in two stages: preprocessing and sequence clustering. We illustrate the approach in a case study where it becomes possible to identify behavioral patterns even in the presence of very diverse and confusing behavior.

The management of development processes is a challenging task and needs adequate tool support. In the course of a development project, many different engineering and management processes are enacted and have to be controlled. The management data has an inherently multidimensional character. Most project and process management systems fail to present large multidimensional datasets in an adequate way. This paper describes a flexible approach, which leverages OLAP technology for the processing and visualization of multidimensional project management data in the plant engineering domain. The management data includes the execution traces and the progress measures of all workflows in an engineering project. The aggregation and visualization of this data facilitates the analysis of a huge number of process instances which is a prerequisite for process improvement.

In this paper we introduce the intelligent Executable Product Model (iEPM) approach for the autonomous optimization of service industry’s business processes. Instead of using a process model, we use an Executable Product Model (EPM). EPMs provide a compact representation of the set of possible execution paths of a business process by defining information dependencies instead of the order of activities. The flexibility that EPMs provide is utilized by intelligent agents managing the execution with the objective to optimize the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) under consideration of the operating conditions. This paper demonstrates the practical application method of the iEPM approach as intelligent BPM engine where agents autonomously adapt their behavior in accordance to the current operating conditions for optimizing KPIs. The advantages of this method are discussed and statistically analyzed using a simulation based approach and the business process “new customer” found in banking.

Process Mining is a technology for extracting non-trivial and useful information from execution logs. For example, there are many process mining techniques to automatically discover a process model describing the causal dependencies between activities . Unfortunately, the quality of a discovered process model strongly depends on the quality and suitability of the input data. For example, the logs of many real-life systems do not refer to the activities an analyst would have in mind, but are on a much more detailed level of abstraction. Trace segmentation attempts to group low-level events into clusters, which represent the execution of a higher-level activity in the (available or imagined) process meta-model. As a result, the simplified log can be used to discover better process models. This paper presents a new activity mining approach based on global trace segmentation. We also present an implementation of the approach, and we validate it using a real-life event log from ASML’s test process.

Process models are considered to be a major asset in modern business organizations. They are expected to apply to all the possible business contexts in which the process may be executed, however not all of these are known a priori. Instead of identifying all contexts before the process is established, we propose to learn from runtime experience which contextual properties should be taken into account by the process model. We propose a model and an associated procedure for identifying and learning the relevant context categories of a process out of runtime experience. We postulate that the context of a process, namely, properties of the specific business case and environmental events, affects its execution and outcomes. However, when a process is launched, the exact effect and affecting variables are not necessarily known. Our approach aims at categorizing possible environmental conditions and case properties into context categories which are meaningful for the process execution. This is achieved by a context learning framework, presented in the paper.

The goal of performance analysis of business processes is to gain insights into operational processes, for the purpose of optimizing them. To intuitively show which parts of the process might be improved, performance analysis results can be projected onto process models. This way, bottlenecks can quickly be identified and resolved.

Unfortunately, for many operational processes, good models, describing the process accurately and intuitively are unavailable. Process mining, or more precisely, process discovery, aims at deriving such models from events logged by information systems. However many mining techniques assume that all events in an event log are logged at the same level of abstraction, which in practice is often not the case. Furthermore, many mining algorithms produce results that are hard to understand by process specialists.

In this paper, we propose a simple clustering algorithm to derive a model from an event log, such that this model only contains a limited set of nodes and edges. Each node represents a set of activities performed in the process, but many nodes can refer to many activities and vice versa.

Using the discovered model, which represents the process at a potentially high level of abstraction, we present two different ways to project performance information onto it. Using these performance projections, process owners can gain insights into the process under consideration in an intuitive way.

To validate our approach, we apply our work to a real-life case from a Dutch municipality.

Process mining refers to the extraction of process models from event logs. Real-life processes tend to be less structured and more flexible. Traditional process mining algorithms have problems dealing with such unstructured processes and generate “spaghetti-like” process models that are hard to comprehend. An approach to overcome this is to cluster process instances such that each of the resulting clusters correspond to coherent sets of process instances that can each be adequately represented by a process model. In this paper, we present multiple feature sets based on conserved patterns and show that the proposed feature sets have a better performance than contemporary approaches. We evaluate the goodness of the formed clusters using established fitness and comprehensibility metrics defined in the context of process mining. The proposed approach is able to generate clusters such that the process models mined from the clustered traces show a high degree of fitness and comprehensibility. Further, the proposed feature sets can be easily discovered in linear time making it amenable to real-time analysis of large data sets.

Checking for compliance is of major importance in nowadays business. Several approaches have been proposed to address different aspects of compliance checking. One of the important aspects of compliance checking is to ensure that business activities will be executed in a certain order. In a previous work, we have presented a formal approach for efficient compliance checking based on model checking technology. A limitation of that approach and of similar approaches is the lack of explanation about how violations could occur. In this paper we resolve this limitation by exploiting the notion of patterns/anti patterns. Execution ordering compliance rules are expressed as BPMN-Q queries. For each query a set of anti pattern queries is automatically derived and checked against process models as well. When a violation (an anti pattern) finds a match, the violating part of the process is shown to the user.

Social software is a new paradigm that is spreading quickly in society, organizations and economics. It supports social interaction and social production. Social interaction is the interaction of non-predetermined individuals. Social production is the creation of artifacts, by combining the input from independent contributors without predetermining the way to do this [1]. Users are supported in creating new contacts, presenting themselves and collaborating with other users. As a result, content, knowledge and software is not created by a hierarchy of experts, but by combining a multitude of contributions of independent authors/actors. Examples for such a social production are wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and tagging, etc.

The relationship of social software and business processes can be twofold. On one hand, business processes may use social software. On the other hand, business processes maybe the object of social software. That means social software is used to act upon the business processes and augment classic BPM approaches. In particular, the benefits from coupling BPM and social software are based on the integration of four principles within social software and their application to business process management (BPM): weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and Service-Dominant Logic. Weak ties are spontaneously created connections between non-predetermined individuals. Social production is the creation of artifacts, by combining the input from independent contributors. The merging of the role of contributor creates the egalitarianism of social software and the consumer of the artifacts created. Thus social software implies, a mutual provisioning of services instead of a unidirectional one.

This paper describes how community participation may be enabled and fostered in a hosted BPM system. We envision an open, collaborative system, wherein users across organizational boundaries can work together to develop and share design-time and run-time artifacts; namely extension activities, workflow models and workflow instances. The system described in this paper enables this collaboration and also allows the community to provide feedback on the shared artifacts via tags, comments and ratings.

In today’s changing environments, organizational design must take into account the fact that business processes are incomplete by nature and that they should be managed in such a way that they do not restrain human intervention. In this paper we propose the embedding of social software features, such as collaboration and wiki-like features, in the modeling and execution tools of business processes. These features will foster people empowerment in the bottom-up design and execution of business processes. We conclude this paper by identifying some research issues about the implementation of the tool and its methodological impact on Business Process Management.

The paper presents a study about one of the most successful cases of social software: Wikipedia. In particular we focused on the investigation of some socio-psychological aspects related to the use of the Italian Wikipedia. In our study, we considered Wikipedia active users classified into three different roles: registered users, administrators, and bureaucrats in order to discuss our findings with respect to these different groups of users. Workflow Management Systems are applications designed to support the definition and execution of business processes. Since we consider that social aspects are relevant in the accomplishment and coordination of activities managed by such technologies, we advocate for a new class of Workflow Management Systems, i.e.,

Workflow Management Social Systems

. These systems should emphasize the social nature of workflow management. For this reason, we propose to consider some of the relevant psychological aspects we identified in our study, interpreted in the light of some relevant socio-psychological theories, for the design of this socially enriched workflow technology.

The point of view of this paper is that social software and business software need different kinds of processes, referred to as social processes and business processes, respectively. Business processes are mainly thought of as orchestrators of external activities to be carried out by users or by services; they embody a centralized perspective in which users are meant to interact with processes and not with each other. Social processes rely on a different paradigm, centered on the participants acting in a social space. The social space keeps track of the past actions so that each participant knows what has been done by the other participants; by acting on the social space, the participants can influence each other. This paper intends to investigate the features of social processes and to bring them to an explicit level of representation by means of an original language, called SPL (Social Processes Language). To this end, this paper analyzes a case of software production, in particular the requirements elicitation phase inspired by the CoREA method, and presents an SPL description of it.

Enterprises are substituting their own IT-Systems by services provided by external providers. This provisioning of services may be done in an industrialized way, separating the service provider from the consumer. However, using industrialized services diminishes the capability to differentiate from competitors. To counter this, collaborative service processes based on the co-creation of value between service providers and prosumers are of huge importance. The approach presented shows how the co-creation of value in IT-service processes can profit from social software, using the example of the Semantic MediaWiki.

Process Models are the tools of choice for capturing business processes and communicating them among staff. In this paper, an approach focusing support in creation and usage as well as the dissemination of process models in organization is described, intending to improve business processes. To accomplish this, the approach makes use of social tagging as an approach to integrate process models into knowledge management (KM). In the paper, the empirical foundation of the approach is described and a corresponding prototype implementing a tagging mechanism for process models is discussed.

Enterprises are finding limitations with current modelling and hierarchical methodologies which have human agents as a key component. By requiring a priori knowledge of both workflow and human agents, when an unanticipated deviation occurs, the rigidity of such models and hierarchies reveals itself. This paper puts forward the position of an inversion of current approaches, in a real time context, by analysing the specific lightweight ad hoc processes, or flexible micro workflows, which occur in expert driven domains. Using gestural analysis of human agents within such flexible micro workflows in combination with social analysis techniques, new flexibility in business processes can be found. These techniques can be applied in differing expert driven problem domains and the resultant data from such analysis of gestural meta data can help to build a reputational representation of human agents within specific business processes, which will assist in finding the most appropriate human agent for a given task.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a well researched scientific area and also established in practice. It is founded on the insight to overcome a department-isolated view of the enterprise and it fosters an enterprise-spanning understanding of the relationship between tasks and its synchronization. Thus, BPM mainly focuses on intra-corporate business processes. However, business processes have changed over the past few years. More and more enterprises work in close co-operations with other companies. Collaborative, work-sharing ways of production are constantly becoming more important. Outsourcing (of business processes) is one of the hot topics in the last years.

Business processes in global economy need closer collaboration with partner enterprises and there is a growing need for BPM systems to support collaborative business processes. Previous researches on collaborative BPM have some shortcomings and there remains a gap between the demand and supply for collaborative BPM. This paper presents a mediator-based collaborative BPM (CBPM) framework together with a CBPM middleware implementing the CBPM framework. The CBPM middleware is built around the HLA/RTI (high level architecture/run time infrastructure) which is the de facto standard in modeling & simulation. Distinctive features of the proposed CBPM middleware include (1) it covers all workflow interoperability models specified by Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), (2) it has a hub architecture allowing scalability and generality, (3) all interoperation messages are handled by a set of standard APIs of WfMC and of HLA/RTI so that anyone who is familiar with those APIs can easily implement the middleware.

Semantic annotations are a way to provide a precise meaning to business process elements, which supports reasoning on properties and constraints. The specification and annotation of business processes is a complex activity involving different analysts possibly working on the same business process.

In this paper we present a framework which aims at supporting business analysts in the collaborative specification and annotation of business processes. A shared workspace, theoretically grounded in a formal representation, allows to collaboratively manipulate processes, ontologies as well as constraints, while a dedicated tool enables to hide the complexity of the underlying formal representation to the users.

The modeling of collaborative business processes is an important issue in order to allow enterprises to implement B2B collaborations with their business partners. We have proposed an MDA-based methodology for the modeling, verification and implementation of collaborative processes. Since collaborative process models are the main artifacts in this MDA-based methodology, a suitable modeling approach is required to design collaborative processes. In this work we describe a modeling approach for collaborative processes based on the UP-ColBPIP language, which is oriented to support the model-driven development of collaborative processes and B2B information systems. The behavior of collaborative processes is modeled through interaction protocols. Enhances to the control flow constructors of interaction protocols are introduced. In addition, we describe an Eclipse-based tool that supports this language.

Recently, business environments have become exceedingly dynamic and competitive. In this situation, many enterprises strive to attract customers by constructing multiple business process (BP) variants. Variances within a single process model are created by a process designer to comply with customers’ needs. However, customers are rarely involved in the design phase. In the near future, a customer-centric system will request more flexibility in design customization. The advantages from the establishment of a user analysis tool will be necessary to any organization. This paper presents an analysis technique for measuring the proximity among processes. The proposed proximity score follows the concept of workflow mining in observing the closeness of the relationships among all activities within process variants. The method enables a process modeler to generate a proximity score directly once a user starts to design. A higher proximity score for a new process design emphasizes a closer relationship with the existing activities among process variants. A simple case study is presented to demonstrate the idea of proximity score in the BP design environment.

The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture, Event Driven Architecture, Software as a Service, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing (CEP). In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed - IT services which are associated with the business process steps. Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of a process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services. A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organizations.

Model-Driven Engineering holds the promise of transforming business models into code automatically. This requires the concept of model transformation. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of model transformations from Event-driven Process Chain models to Business Process Execution Language specifications. To this purpose, we use a framework based on ontological analysis and workflow patterns in order to predict the possibilities/limitations of such a model transformation. The framework is validated by evaluating the transformation of several models, including a real-life case.

The framework indicates several limitations for transformation. Eleven guidelines and an approach to apply them provide methodological support to improve the feasibility of model transformation from EPC to BPEL.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a powerful technology for supporting advanced event-processing scenarios at a higher level of abstraction. Because of its expressiveness, CEP allows prompt creation and classification of new event-processing design patterns, some of which have been implemented in the past in a non-reusable form. This paper documents a set of new patterns for event processing, describing their problem domain and providing a solution template implemented using CEP, which is both succinct and highly re-usable.

The paper aims at answering to the challenge of defining an executable semantics for the

activity

concept, in the context of Business Process Modeling and Simulation. The main purpose for introducing an activity concept on top of the basic Discrete Event Simulation concepts of objects and events is to define an activity as consisting of a start event and an end event. This idea is well-known from the business process modeling literature, e.g. from BPDM. We also expect the adoption of this concept view for the BPMN activity in the future BPMN 2.0 Specification. A case study is used throughout the paper to illustrate the concepts and to present our results.

The notion of event-driven process chains (EPC) is widely used to model processes. It is an ongoing discussion of how to reach executable workflows from EPCs. While the transformation of the general structure and the functions is well-understood, the transformation of events is an open issue. This paper discusses different possible events types and their semantics. Furthermore, it presents a transformation of the introduced event types to workflow constructs respecting the semantics of each event.

One of the most challenging business process categories in terms of agility are those exhibiting dynamic behaviour and involving intense human decision. Any effort to automate such processes may constrain their agility, which constitutes an intrinsic requirement for this process category. Therefore, these two factors, i.e. intense human involvement and dynamic behaviour, pose a challenge regarding the role of a BPMS for such processes. In this paper, we explore the role of BPMS for dynamic, human-intensive processes and propose an event-driven modeling approach that efficiently supports modeling requirements of such processes. To validate our approach we provided a case study from the medical arena concerning medical treatment, which is a typical example of dynamic, human-intensive processes. While the focus of this paper is to introduce the modeling concepts, enactment aspects of the proposed approach are also discussed.

The working environment in health care organizations is characterized by its demand for highly dynamic human resource management in which (a) medical personnel are generally associated with several disparate types of tasks, (b) service location and service personnel change frequently, (c) emergency issues could arise at any time, and (d) the stakes are high since invaluable human lives are involved. There is an urgent need from both researchers and health care organizations to develop mechanisms for maintaining a good balance between efficient management and superior medical service quality. We discuss the potential for real-time health care coordination and effective medical human resource management enabled by event-driven RFID item-level tracking/tracing identification technology. We explore the uniqueness of instance-level process mining and its application in health care environment. We propose an adaptive learning framework that supports real-time health care coordination.

This paper discusses a framework for Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts for Service Based Applications (SBA) with respect to customers’ goals seen as an important part of such contracts. Within standard SLA contracts concepts, as mutual agreements between service providers and users, we introduce

Key Goal Indicators

(KGIs). These are parameters that state how well service-based processes achieve the customers’ goals. The SLA contract includes parameters of KPI, KGI and IT infrastructure type. Possible violations of each type are checked in the monitoring phase and an action is taken to adapt the violated condition through an adaptation mechanism. We describe the phases of a methodology for creating, monitoring, and adapting an SLA contract, in particular, leveraging aspects of Quality of Service (QoS) violations.

Providing effective IT support for business processes has become crucial for enterprises to stay competitive. In response to this need numerous process support paradigms (e.g., workflow management, service flow management, case handling), process specification standards (e.g., WS-BPEL, BPML, BPMN), process tools (e.g., ARIS Toolset, Tibco Staffware, FLOWer), and supporting methods have emerged in recent years. Summarized under the term “Business Process Management” (BPM), these paradigms, standards, tools, and methods have become a success-critical instrument for improving process performance.

Today, process management is a well established management tool both in theory and in practice. Its objective is the increase of the efficiency and it is thus regarded as a fundament to both the economic development of the companies and of the economy as a whole. Examination of the literature reveals many theoretical concepts which in some aspects may differ considerably - even to the point of mutual contradiction. How does practice looks like? To answer this question, we wanted to carry out an empirically analysis of management practice focusing on general conditions, process modeling and execution, the IT and the employees. This will be compared with an examination of the theoretical concepts and we will try to elaborate the main concepts used in practice, which are finally presented in this full paper.

The number of BPM products available has increased substantially in the last years, so that choosing among these products became a difficult task for potential BPM users. This paper defines a framework for evaluating BPM products, and discusses how this framework has been applied in the development of an open and objective evaluation method for these products. Our framework has been developed based on the BPM lifecycle we developed as a result of a thorough literature survey. Our method consists of a set of criteria, a test case and a rating schema. The paper also discusses how we evaluated our method (and indirectly our framework) by applying it to three BPM tool suites. We show that our method allows the rigorous comparison of these products according to different criteria, so that the choice of BPM product can be tuned to the specific goals of the users of these products.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach has been developed to enhance the integration of various systems functionalities to allow organizations to be more flexible in case of business changes. This paper will explain what aspects (hereafter called “

components

”) need to be included into a SOA methodology. These components are defined in a model developed from an analysis of the state of the art in SOA and related areas. The components are classified into five groups (hereafter called “

domains

”). From August 2008 to January 2009, an empirical study has been performed on a world-wide basis to test the SOA domain model with the identified critical success factors. The results of this questionnaire give first answers to questions and assumptions discussed in academia about process-driven SOA implementation methodologies.

Much efforts are aimed at unveiling the factors that influence a person’s comprehension of a business process model. While various potential factors have been proposed and studied in an experimental setting, little attention is being paid to reliability and validity requirements on measuring a person’s structural understanding of a process model. This paper proposes the concepts to meaningfully argue about these notions, for the sake of improving future measurement instruments. The findings from an experiment, involving 178 students from three different universities, underline the importance of this topic. In particular, it is shown that the

coverage

of model-related questions is important. This paper provides various recommendations to properly measure structural model comprehension.

The rise of interest in declarative languages for process modeling both justifies and demands empirical investigations into their presumed advantages over more traditional, imperative alternatives. Our concern in this paper is with the ease of maintaining business process models, for example due to changing performance or conformance demands. We aim to contribute to a rigorous, theoretical discussion of this topic by drawing a link to well-established research on maintainability of information artifacts.

Visualized business process models are the central artifacts to communicate knowledge about working procedures in organizations. Since more organizations take the process perspective to share knowledge and make decisions, it is worth investigating how the processes are elicited.

In current practice, analysts interview domain experts and translate their understanding to process models. Domain experts, often unfamiliar with process thinking, have problems understanding the models and providing meaningful feedback.

It is our desire to improve process elicitation and strengthen the role of the domain expert. To do so, we propose to complement interviews with a toolkit and a methodology to engage the domain experts in process modeling. We call this Tangible Business Process Modeling (TBPM). In this paper, we outline our approach and present the design of an experiment for empirical validation. Through the use of TBPM, pracitioners are expected to achieve better understanding, higher consensus and a higher rate of adoption of the results.

Business processes are often modelled using a language for which no semantics is standardized in a formal way. Examples for such languages are BPMN or Event-Driven Process Chains. The common way for reasoning about the soundness of such models is to define a formal semantics first by translating the model into a well-founded formalism (for example Petri-nets). Afterwards, formal reasoning methods can be applied on the obtained formal model. In the past years, several such semantics that give a formal meaning to BPMN or EPC models have been published.

In this paper, we used a repository of almost 1,000 real-world EPC models and computed their soundness using three different tools. Those tools build on different semantics definitions: Kindler’s fixed-point semantics, Mendling’s state/context semantics and the YAWL semantics. While the soundness results for the majority of models were the same for all three tools, we identified a few interesting cases where the results differ. The results of our comparative study can lead to a better understanding of the differences between the semantics.

Choosing the adequate size of process activities (process granularity) is a problem during process design. Vanderfeesten

et al.

have proposed a heuristic based on a process granularity metric and postulated a hypothesis concerning error probability about its use. The heuristic prefers process designs with high cohesion and low coupling—a principle originating in software engineering.

In this paper, we present an experimentation system consisting of a small web-based workflow engine for empirically analyzing the error probability hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of a conducted experiment with 165 students using this experimentation system are reported. The experiment does not support the hypothesis. Instead, an alternative error probability model explaining the results is suggested.

This short paper reports on an online platform where modelers can gather, share and discuss knowledge around BPMN. The models, ratings, comments and discussions are no longer based on pictures but related to actual process models that can be edited in the web browser. After two months 97 registered users developed and shared 166 process models and 372 revisions. In this paper we introduce the platform, show its architecture and provide samples for data extraction and analysis. We invite researchers to use the available data to conduct further empirical studies.

During the last decade we have developed the ADEPT next generation process management technology. Its features and its different prototype versions attracted a number of companies. However, an enterprise cannot base the implementation of its process-aware information system (PAIS) on an experimental prototype, especially if maintenance and further development are not assured. At the beginning of 2008, therefore, we founded a spin-off as joint venture with industrial partners to transfer ADEPT into an industrial-strength product version called

AristaFlow BPM Suite

, and to provide maintenance support for it. The product version is now available for academic and industrial use.

Healthcare organizations and providers are facing the challenge of delivering high quality services to their patients, at affordable costs. High degree of specialization of medical disciplines, prolonged medical care for the ageing population, increased costs for dealing with chronic diseases, and the need for personalized healthcare are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situation necessitates a change in the way healthcare is delivered to the patients and healthcare processes are managed.

In BPM, several formalisms have been proposed to model Workflows. Almost independently, several formalisms have been developed to model clinical practice guidelines (CPG). Since the increasing informatization of healthcare processes is demanding for an integrated treatment of medical activities, some approaches have started to fill the gap between the Workflow and CPG areas. In most cases, such approaches have tried to adapt and/or extend one of the formalisms (either a Workflow or a CPG formalism) in order to cope with the whole set of phenomena. In this position paper, we argue in favor of an alternative hybrid approach, in which a CPG approach is used to focus on “physician-oriented” issues, a Workflow approach is used to cope with the related “business-oriented” issues, and the integration of them is obtained at the underlying semantic level, where general inferential mechanisms operate.

Clinical guidelines provide recommendations to assist clinicians in making decisions regarding appropriate medical care for specific patient situations. However, characterizing these situations is difficult as it requires taking into account all the variations that patients may present. We propose an approach which helps with identifying and categorizing the contexts that need to be taken into account within a clinical process. Our methodology is based on a formal process model and on a collection of process execution instances. We apply machine-learning algorithms to group process instances by similarity of their paths and outcomes and derive the contextual properties of each group. We illustrate the application of our methodology to a urinary tract infection management process. Our approach yields promising results with high accuracy for some of the context groups that were identified.

Inadequate availability of patient information is a major cause for medical errors and affects costs in healthcare. Traditional information integration in healthcare does not solve the problem. Applying the classic diagnostic-therapeuthic cycle as the model for a document-oriented information exchange protocol allows to foster inter-institutional information exchange in healthcare. The goal of the proposed architecture is to provide information exchange between strict autonomous healthcare institutions, bridging the gap between primary and secondary care, following traditional paper-based working practice. The combination of a

rest

ful architecture with a distributed light-weight workflow model provides minimized requirement for participating systems.

Inter-institutional collaboration requires clean task boundaries and the separation of responsibilities. In addition, healthcare processes are intrinsically fluid. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented workflow models do not provide adequate support for the paper-based working practice in healthcare. The

α

-flow approach adopts electronic documents as the primary means of information ex-change, fusing both paradigms into a combined workflow schema model, wherein workflow schemas are represented as documents which are shared coequally to content documents.

The management of clinical trial applications by public authorities is a complex process involving several regulations, actors, and IT systems. In this paper we present a modeling approach based on semantic information models that supports this process. In particular, the approach can be used for the generation of user-centric visualizations, performance and compliance analyses and the distribution of the contained knowledge within an organization and to third parties. The approach has been developed together with AGES PharmMed and applied to their core processes.

While workflow management technology is applied in many industrial domains to improve the operational efficiency of business process execution, its usage in the healthcare domain is limited. One possible cause is that healthcare processes are often considered to be more whimsical and less predictable than procedures found in industry. Extending previous work on

workflow

and

flexibility patterns

, this paper presents a methodology for realizing processes that possess the required degree of flexibility that makes them suitable for the healthcare domain. To demonstrate the methodology’s feasibility, it is applied to the processes that are found in a Dutch outpatient clinic. Interestingly, the flexibility demands of the investigated processes match quite well with the capabilities of current workflow management technologies, further motivating their increased usage in the healthcare domain.

Healthcare providers are under pressure to work more efficiently and in a more patient-focused way. One possible way to achieve this is to launch Business Process Redesign (BPR) initiatives, which focus on changing the structure of the involved processes and using IT as an enabler for such changes. In this paper, we argue that a list of historically successful improvement tactics, the

BPR best practices

, are a highly suitable ingredient for such efforts in the healthcare domain. Our assessment is based on the analysis of 14 case studies. The insights obtained by the analysis also led to an extension of the original set of best practices.

The user view of the quality of IT-supported health care processes is very important for a successful performance of these processes. Current approaches to process quality do not capture this point of view explicitly. This position paper provides a first collection of indicators for this view.

Health care workflows (careflows) involve complex, distributive processes with a high degree of variability. There are ubiquitous communication and massive data and knowledge management requirements and the processes are time sensitive, involve complex timing requirements, and are safety critical. Designing these processes and managing their performance is difficult and error prone. Using verification techniques, mathematical methods of proving correctness, we can reduce errors and ensure that the processes satisfy their specifications. We present a prototype next-generation multi-threaded model checker to reason about timed processes in careflows sensitive to patient preferences and the goals of the careteam using a temporal logic extended with modalities of beliefs, desires and intentions.

Optimal support for complex healthcare processes cannot be provided by a single out-of-the-box Process-Aware Information System and necessitates the construction of customized applications based on these systems. In order to allow for the seamless integration of the new technology into the existing operational processes of a healthcare organization, ensuring the correct operation and reliability of the developed system are of the utmost importance. This paper proposes an approach in which the same model is used for specifying, developing, testing and validating the operational performance of a new system. The benefits of using the same model for different purposes are decreased potential for loss of user requirements and increased confidence in

reliability

and

correct operation

of the resultant system before its deployment. This approach has been applied to a schedule-based workflow system developed for the AMC hospital in Amsterdam.

This report will present a collection of tools that supports the precise definition, careful analysis, and execution of processes that coordinate the actions of humans, automated devices, and software systems for the delivery of health care. The tools have been developed over the past several years and are currently being evaluated through their application to four health care processes, blood transfusion, chemotherapy, emergency department operations, and identity verification. The tools are integrated with each other using the Eclipse framework or through the sharing of artifacts so that the internal representations generated by one might be used to expedite the actions of others. This integrated collection of tools is intended to support the continuous improvement of health care delivery processes. The process definitions developed through this framework are executable and intended for eventual use in helping to guide actual health care workers in the performance of their activities, including the utilization of medical devices and information systems.

In the past decades, conceptual models have proven to be a useful means to support information systems engineering. Nevertheless, due to the usual complexity of information systems, creating and especially maintaining conceptual models is quite challenging and costly.

The manual adaptation of conceptual models in general and reference models in particular is a time consuming and error prone task, which has to be carefully conducted. The configurative reference modeling approach promises support for the model developer as well as for the model user, as certain parts of a model can be automatically removed with respect to the requirements of a certain perspective. By this automation, the risk of creating faulty models during adaptation can be highly reduced. However, up to now this approach exists in terms of its conceptual specification, leaving software support to a proprietary prototype, not providing support for widespread modeling tools, which is necessary for acceptance and applicability of the approach. To face this gap, our approach proposes an XML schema, enabling the configuration of serialized conceptual model data of virtually any modeling language and any modeling tool capable of XML export.

Reference Modeling has evolved as a strong discipline especially driven by the German speaking community. Great achievements have been made in finding ways to leverage the potentials of reuse in business modeling. However, the perception of reference modeling as such is still limited to a rather small group of scholars. This is surprising as the phenomenon of “re-use” is very much in the center of various current topics in the international information systems and business process management discipline. In this paper, we set out exploring the contribution of findings in the field of reference modeling for business standardization. We show that in particular design techniques for reference modeling perfectly apply to solve conflicts of globalization and localization in business standards. As an example, we study the UMM as a specific standard developed within the United Nations CEFACT group.

This research-in-progress paper summarizes first results of the INPROVY project by applying reference modeling to the simulation of mobile construction machinery. Four Business cases for a potential application of reference modeling are derived by an expert interview. For these four business cases this paper discusses principles of reference modeling can be applied best and how reference modeling can be used to support Simulation of Mobile Construction Machinery economically.

A new kind of Web-based applications, known as Enterprise Mashups, has gained momentum in the recent years. The vision is that business users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner user friendly building blocks in the envisioned Enterprise 2.0. However, the transfer of this concept into practice is still a serious issue. Whereas most research focuses on technical aspects, we point the organizational dimension of implementing Enterprise Mashups. In particular, we claim that new capabilities are needed within the implementing organization that have yet to be discovered. For that purpose we propose a reference model for organizing Enterprise Mashup environments. We also report on two applications of this model within the projects SAP Research RoofTop Marketplace and FAST. In summary, we reflect on the usefulness of the reference model for making Mashups happen in enterprise environments.