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2010 | Buch

Business Process Management

8th International Conference, BPM 2010, Hoboken, NJ, USA, September 13-16, 2010. Proceedings

herausgegeben von: Richard Hull, Jan Mendling, Stefan Tai

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Über dieses Buch

The BPM Conference series has established itself as the premier forum for - searchersintheareaofbusinessprocessmanagementandprocess-awareinfor- tion systems. It has a record of attracting contributions of innovative research of the highest quality related to all aspects of business process management, including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, systems, and empirical ?ndings. BPM 2010 was the 8th conference of the series. It took place September 14- 16, 2010 on the campus of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA—with a great view of Manhattan, New York. This volume c- tains 21 contributed research papers that were selected from 151 submissions. The thorough reviewing process (each paper was reviewed by three to ?ve P- gram Committee members followed in most cases by in-depth discussions) was extremely competitive with an acceptance rate of 14%. In addition to the c- tributed papers, these proceedings contain three short papers about the invited keynote talks. In conjunction with the main conference, nine international workshops took place the day before the conference. These workshops fostered the exchange of fresh ideas and experiences between active BPM researchers, and stimulated discussions on new and emerging issues in line with the conference topics. The proceedings with the papers of all workshops will be published in a separate volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing series. Beyond that, the conference also included a doctoral consortium, an industry program, ?reside chats, tutorials, panels, and demonstrations.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Invited Talks

The Next Decade of BPM
Abstract
Business process management has been around for 20+ years. It can generally be described as having two distinct eras so far: in the 1990’s BPM was led by process experts inside the business who transformed the focus from big-bang quality improvement initiatives (BPR-style) toward a focus on operational measurement and continuous improvement; in the 2000’s BPM shifted to an IT-led competency, centering on the role technology played in process understanding and improvement. In 2010, BPM is still the province of experts from the business and IT. What’s next? Two key changes will occur by 2020. First, notions of process will change from today’s workflow-centric depictions to a more business-focused view of operations, transparency and measurement. Second, as we move from middleware-dependent systems into cloud-based software, BPM participation will spread throughout the organization, disintermediating the “experts,” enabling entire cultures based on change and business improvement.
Phil Gilbert
BPM in Cloud Architectures: Business Process Management with SLAs and Events
Introduction
Applications are becoming increasingly distributed and loosely coupled in terms of their development processes, software architectures, deployment platforms, and other aspects. For example, inWeb mashups [12,13], utility or cloud computing environments [2,3], and service-oriented architectures (SOA) [4,10] applications are developed by orchestrating reusable services using high level workflows or business processes. Application developers, however, must navigate a complex ecosystem that includes the services they depend on, the execution platforms of their applications and services, and the users of these applications, none of which they have much control over.
Vinod Muthusamy, Hans-Arno Jacobsen
Warning: Don’t Assume Your Business Processes Use Master Data
Outline
It’s an age old question: Which came first: data or process? – When this question is presented to IT professionals, the answer depends heavily on each person’s individual perspective and role within IT. Ask most business process professionals, and the immediate response is: “Without process, data does not exist.” Ask data management professionals, and the immediate response is: “Without data, processes can’t execute.”
Clay Richardson

BPM in Practice

IT Requirements of Business Process Management in Practice – An Empirical Study
Abstract
Substantial use of dedicated software characterizes the highest level of Business Process Management (BPM) maturity. Currently, companies are far below this level. This situation is due to the fact that the existing BPM tools don’t satisfy key requirements of BPM. We have conducted a worldwide survey of major public companies to elicit these requirements, which are grounded in the nature of processes and the usage of software. The analysis of 130 responses indicates that human-oriented process modeling languages and BPM tools as well as BPM tools with software integration capabilities are most urgently required.
Susanne Patig, Vanessa Casanova-Brito, Barbara Vögeli
How Novices Model Business Processes
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the design of business process diagrams in contexts where novice analysts only have basic design tools such as paper and pencils available, and little to no understanding of formalized modeling approaches. Based on a quasi-experimental study with 89 BPM students, we identify five distinct process design archetypes ranging from textual to hybrid, and graphical representation forms. We also examine the quality of the designs and identify which representation formats enable an analyst to articulate business rules, states, events, activities, temporal and geospatial information in a process model. We found that the quality of the process designs decreases with the increased use of graphics and that hybrid designs featuring appropriate text labels and abstract graphical forms are well-suited to describe business processes. Our research has implications for practical process design work in industry as well as for academic curricula on process design.
Jan Recker, Niz Safrudin, Michael Rosemann
BPM in Practice: Who Is Doing What?
Abstract
This paper investigates the adoption of BPM, i.e., the use and deployment of BPM concepts in different kinds of organizations. A set of 33 completed, industrial BPM projects is analyzed based on project documentation and interviews with involved project members. In addition to the main study, which is conducted in the Netherlands, the paper also presents results of a replication study in Germany comprising six interview-based case studies and an international survey among 77 BPM experts. Thereby, various characteristics of BPM projects (such as a project’s objective, strategic orientation or focus area) are analyzed to derive valuable insights both for practitioners performing BPM projects and for academics facing the challenge to support practitioners with innovative solutions in the field of BPM.
Hajo A. Reijers, Sander van Wijk, Bela Mutschler, Maarten Leurs

Correctness

How to Implement a Theory of Correctness in the Area of Business Processes and Services
Abstract
During the previous years, we presented several results concerned with various issues related to the correctness of models for business processes and services (i. e., interorganizational business processes). For most of the results, we presented tools and experimental evidence for the computational capabilities of our approaches. Over the time, the implementations grew to a consistent and interoperable family of tools, which we call service-technology.org .
This paper aims at presenting this tool family service-technology.org as a whole. We briefly sketch the underlying formalisms and covered problem settings and describe the functionality of the participating tools. Furthermore, we discuss several lessons that we learned from the development and use of this tool family. We believe that the lessons are interesting for other academic tool development.
Niels Lohmann, Karsten Wolf
Deciding Behaviour Compatibility of Complex Correspondences between Process Models
Abstract
Compatibility of two process models can be verified using common notions of behaviour inheritance. However, these notions postulate 1:1 correspondences between activities of both models. This assumption is violated once activities from one model are refined or collapsed in the other model or in case there are groups of corresponding activities. Therefore, our work lifts the work on behaviour inheritance to the level of complex 1:n and n:m correspondences. Our contribution is (1) the definition of notions of behaviour compatibility for models that have complex correspondences and (2) a structural characterisation of these notions for sound free-choice process models that allows for computationally efficient reasoning. We show the applicability of our technique, by applying it in a case study in which we determine the compatibility between a set of reference process models and models that implement them.
Matthias Weidlich, Remco Dijkman, Mathias Weske
Correctness Ensuring Process Configuration: An Approach Based on Partner Synthesis
Abstract
A configurable process model describes a family of similar process models in a given domain. Such a model can be configured to obtain a specific process model that is subsequently used to handle individual cases, for instance, to process customer orders. Process configuration is notoriously difficult as there may be all kinds of interdependencies between configuration decisions. In fact, an incorrect configuration may lead to behavioral issues such as deadlocks and livelocks. To address this problem, we present a novel verification approach inspired by the “operating guidelines” used for partner synthesis. We view the configuration process as an external service, and compute a characterization of all such services which meet particular requirements using the notion of configuration guideline. As a result, we can characterize all feasible configurations (i. e., configurations without behavioral problems) at design time, instead of repeatedly checking each individual configuration while configuring a process model.
Wil van der Aalst, Niels Lohmann, Marcello La Rosa, Jingxin Xu

Design

Impact of Granularity on Adjustment Behavior in Adaptive Reuse of Business Process Models
Abstract
Business process diagrams as exteriorized forms of distributed organizational knowledge can be valuable assets when shared and reused in similar process design tasks. However, little empirical research has been conducted to shed light on the cognitive processes involved during the adaptation of retrieved process models. We hypothesize that model granularity has significant effects on human adjustment behavior irrespective of the editing distances between reuse and solution models. The results of our laboratory experiment, which is dimensioned according to real-world cases, contribute to a more specific classification of adaptation operations and their cognitive efforts, and refine the notion of process similarity. This study follows up on our former research work by amending minor flaws in the experiment setup; it now provides a comprehensive analytical apparatus for further replicated tests as the predictive power of our explorative study, regarding e.g. varied business contexts and task dimensions, remains limited.
Oliver Holschke
Machine-Assisted Design of Business Process Models Using Descriptor Space Analysis
Abstract
In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in developing methods and tools for automating the design of business process models. This work suggests a method for machine-assisted design of new process models, based on business logic that is extracted from real-life process repositories using a linguistic analysis of the relationships between constructs of process descriptors. The analysis enables the construction of a descriptor space in which it is possible to define new process sequences. The suggested method can assist process analysts in designing new business processes while making use of knowledge that is encoded in the design of existing process repositories. To demonstrate the method we developed a software tool (“New Process Design Assistant” - NPDA) that automates the suggested design method. We tested our tool on the Oracle Applications ERP process repository, showing our approach to be effective in enabling the design of new activities within new business process models.
Maya Lincoln, Mati Golani, Avigdor Gal
From Informal Process Diagrams to Formal Process Models
Abstract
Process modeling is an important activity in business transformation projects. Free-form diagramming tools, such as PowerPoint and Visio, are the preferred tools for creating process models. However, the designs created using such tools are informal sketches, which are not amenable to automated analysis. Formal models, although desirable, are rarely created (during early design) because of the usability problems associated with formal-modeling tools. In this paper, we present an approach for automatically inferring formal process models from informal business process diagrams, so that the strengths of both types of tools can be leveraged. We discuss different sources of structural and semantic ambiguities, commonly present in informal diagrams, which pose challenges for automated inference. Our approach consists of two phases. First, it performs structural inference to identify the set of nodes and edges that constitute a process model. Then, it performs semantic interpretation, using a classifier that mimics human reasoning to associate modeling semantics with the nodes and edges. We discuss both supervised and unsupervised techniques for training such a classifier. Finally, we report results of empirical studies, conducted using flow diagrams from real projects, which illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Debdoot Mukherjee, Pankaj Dhoolia, Saurabh Sinha, Aubrey J. Rembert, Mangala Gowri Nanda

Distributed Processes

Value-Oriented Coordination Process Modeling
Abstract
Business webs are collections of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer need. Designing business webs calls for modeling the collaboration of enterprises from different perspectives, in particular the business value and coordination process perspectives, and for mutually aligning these perspectives. However, business value modeling and coordination process modeling have different goals and use different concepts. Nevertheless, the resulting models should be consistent with each other because they refer to the same system. In this paper we define consistency between value models and coordination models in multi-perspective e-business web design and give guidelines to produce consistent coordination process models from business value models in a simple and stepwise manner. We provide an initial validation of these guidelines with a real-world example of business web design.
Hassan Fatemi, Marten van Sinderen, Roel Wieringa
Coordination for Fragmented Loops and Scopes in a Distributed Business Process
Abstract
This paper addresses partitioning business processes that contain loops as well as compensation and fault handling scopes. The resulting process fragments can be distributed and wired together, recreating the execution semantics of the original process model. In earlier work, we presented BPEL fragmentation covering data and explicit control dependencies. We now extend the approach to handle fragmenting loops and scopes. Maintaining the focus on standards and maximizing extensibility of Web service runtimes and standards, the solution defines and uses new coordination protocols that plug into the WS-Coordination framework. An implementation is presented, extending the Active Endpoints BPEL engine and a WS-Coordination system.
Rania Khalaf, Frank Leymann
PAPEL: A Language and Model for Provenance-Aware Policy Definition and Execution
Abstract
The processing of data is often restricted by contractual and legal requirements for protecting privacy and IPRs. Policies provide means to control how and by whom data is processed. Conditions of policies may depend on the previous processing of the data. However, existing policy languages do not provide means to express such conditions. In this work we present a formal model and language allowing for specifying conditions based on the history of data processing. We base the model and language on XACML.
Christoph Ringelstein, Steffen Staab

Mining

A Fresh Look at Precision in Process Conformance
Abstract
Process Conformance is a crucial step in the area of Process Mining: the adequacy of a model derived from applying a discovery algorithm to a log must be certified before making further decisions that affect the system under consideration. Among the different conformance dimensions, in this paper we propose a novel measure for precision, based on the simple idea of counting these situations were the model deviates from the log. Moreover, a log-based traversal of the model that avoids inspecting its whole behavior is presented. Experimental results show a significant improvement when compared to current approaches for the same task. Finally, the detection of the shortest traces in the model that lead to discrepancies is presented.
Jorge Muñoz-Gama, Josep Carmona
Trace Alignment in Process Mining: Opportunities for Process Diagnostics
Abstract
Process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial knowledge and interesting insights from event logs. Process mining provides a welcome extension of the repertoire of business process analysis techniques and has been adopted in various commercial BPM systems (BPM∣one, Futura Reflect, ARIS PPM, Fujitsu, etc.). Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with less-structured processes. The resulting models are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. Therefore, we propose a new approach based on trace alignment. The goal is to align traces in a way that event logs can be explored easily. Trace alignment can be used in a preprocessing phase where the event log is investigated or filtered and in later phases where detailed questions need to be answered. Hence, it complements existing process mining techniques focusing on discovery and conformance checking.
R. P. Jagadeesh Chandra Bose, Wil van der Aalst
Content-Aware Resolution Sequence Mining for Ticket Routing
Abstract
Ticket routing is key to the efficiency of IT problem management. Due to the complexity of many reported problems, problem tickets typically need to be routed among various expert groups, to search for the right resolver. In this paper, we study the problem of using historical ticket data to make smarter routing recommendations for new tickets, so as to improve the efficiency of ticket routing, in terms of the Mean number of Steps To Resolve (MSTR) a ticket.
Previous studies on this problem have been focusing on mining ticket resolution sequences to generate more informed routing recommendations. In this work, we enhance the existing sequence-only approach by further mining the text content of tickets. Through extensive studies on real-world problem tickets, we find that neither resolution sequence nor ticket content alone is sufficient to deliver the most reduction in MSTR, while a hybrid approach that mines resolution sequences in a content-aware manner proves to be the most effective. We therefore propose such an approach that first analyzes the content of a new ticket and identifies a set of semantically relevant tickets, and then creates a weighted Markov model from the resolution sequences of these tickets to generate routing recommendations. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves significantly better results than both sequence-only and content-only solutions.
Peng Sun, Shu Tao, Xifeng Yan, Nikos Anerousis, Yi Chen

Semantics

Symbolic Execution of Acyclic Workflow Graphs
Abstract
We propose a new technique to analyze the control-flow, i.e., the workflow graph of a business process model, which we call symbolic execution. We consider acyclic workflow graphs that may contain inclusive OR gateways and define a symbolic execution for them that runs in quadratic time. The result allows us to decide in quadratic time, for any pair of control-flow edges or tasks of the workflow graph, whether they are sometimes, never, or always reached concurrently. This has different applications in finding control- and data-flow errors. In particular, we show how to decide soundness of an acyclic workflow graph with inclusive OR gateways in quadratic time. Moreover, we show that symbolic execution provides diagnostic information that allows the user to efficiently deal with spurious errors that arise due to over-approximation of the data-based decisions in the process.
Cédric Favre, Hagen Völzer
Structuring Acyclic Process Models
Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of transforming a process model with an arbitrary topology into an equivalent well-structured process model. While this problem has received significant attention, there is still no full characterization of the class of unstructured process models that can be transformed into well-structured ones, nor an automated method to structure any process model that belongs to this class. This paper fills this gap in the context of acyclic process models. The paper defines a necessary and sufficient condition for an unstructured process model to have an equivalent structured model under fully concurrent bisimulation, as well as a complete structuring method.
Artem Polyvyanyy, Luciano García-Bañuelos, Marlon Dumas
A New Semantics for the Inclusive Converging Gateway in Safe Processes
Abstract
We propose a new semantics for the inclusive converging gateway (also known as Or-join). The new semantics coincides with the intuitive, widely agreed semantics for Or-joins on sound acyclic workflow graphs which is implied, for example, by dead path elimination on BPEL flows. The new semantics also coincides with the block-based semantics as used in BPEL on cyclic graphs that can be composed from sound acyclic graphs, repeat- and while-loops. Furthermore, we display several examples for unstructured workflow graphs for which Or-joins get the desired intuitive semantics. A key insight is that not all situations where two or more Or-joins seem to be mutually dependent (known as ‘vicious circles’) are necessarily symmetric. Many such situations are asymmetric and can be resolved naturally in favor of one of the Or-joins. Still symmetric or almost symmetric situations exist, for which it is not clear what semantics is desirable and which result in a deadlock in our semantics. We show that enabledness of an Or-join in our semantics can be decided in linear time in the size of the workflow graph.
Hagen Völzer

Processes and People

From People to Services to UI: Distributed Orchestration of User Interfaces
Abstract
Traditionally, workflow management systems aim at alleviating people’s burden of coordinating repetitive business procedures, i.e., they coordinate people. Web service orchestration approaches, instead, coordinate pieces of software (the web services), hiding the human aspects that are intrinsically present in any business process behind the services. The recent emergence of technologies like BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask, which introduce human actors into service compositions, manifest that taking into account the people involved in business processes is however important. Yet, none of these approaches allow one to also develop the user interfaces (UIs) the users need to concretely participate in a business process.
With this paper, we want to go one step beyond state-of-the-art workflow management and service composition and propose an original model, language and running system for the composition of distributed UIs, an approach that allows us to bring together UIs, web services and people in a single orchestration logic and tool. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the idea, we apply the approach to a real-world home assistance scenario.
Florian Daniel, Stefano Soi, Stefano Tranquillini, Fabio Casati, Chang Heng, Li Yan
Self-adjusting Recommendations for People-Driven Ad-Hoc Processes
Abstract
A company’s ability to flexibly adapt to changing business requirements is one key factor to remain competitive. The required flexibility in people-driven processes is usually achieved through ad-hoc workflows. Effective guidance in ad-hoc workflows requires simultaneous consideration of multiple goals: support of individual work habits, exploration of crowd process knowledge, and automatic adaptation to changes. This paper presents a self-adjusting approach for providing context-sensitive process recommendations based on the analysis of user behavior, crowd processes, and continuous application of process detection. Specifically, we classify users as eagles (i.e., specialists) or flock. The approach is evaluated in the context of the European research project Commius.
Christoph Dorn, Thomas Burkhart, Dirk Werth, Schahram Dustdar
A Collaborative Approach to Maturing Process-Related Knowledge
Abstract
We introduce a new approach supporting knowledge workers in sharing process-related knowledge. It is based on the insight that - while offering valuable context information - traditional business process modelling approaches are too rigid and inflexible to capture the actual way processes are executed. Therefore, business process models are made agile and open for changes during execution. To achieve this, the strict distinction between build time modelling and run time execution are softened and process activities are represented to the users in a way that allows for individual adaptations. That can be done by attaching resources, commenting on an issue or adding problems and solutions to an activity or process. In addition activities can be delegated or new (sub-)activities can be added. Thus, the model can adapt to the reality of actual process executions and valuable resources and experiences are proactively presented to users in the right context. A double-staged approach is chosen to apply the model in the real application scenario of a university.
Hans Friedrich Witschel, Bo Hu, Uwe V. Riss, Barbara Thönssen, Roman Brun, Andreas Martin, Knut Hinkelmann
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Business Process Management
herausgegeben von
Richard Hull
Jan Mendling
Stefan Tai
Copyright-Jahr
2010
Verlag
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN
978-3-642-15618-2
Print ISBN
978-3-642-15617-5
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15618-2

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