Business Process Management Workshops

This paper introduces DML, a dependency modeling language for analyzing and developing business process models in a front-loading context. Front-loading describes an approach for up front analysis of problems and effects that come with the development and introduction of new products and accompanying processes into an existing portfolio. The paper also describes BusinessMapper, a graphical editing tool for DML that enables users to interactively model interrelations and interactions between business processes on an abstracted level. By employing run time evaluation mechanisms, BusinessMapper makes the effects of new processes or other entities in the model instantly evident to the user. Users can thus interactively adjust parameters to fit new products and their accompanying processes into existing process landscapes.

Business process orientation can be interpreted as the organizational approach making business processes the platform for organizational structure, strategic planning, and information technology. While recent research focused on the question whether process-oriented organizational design impacts firm performance, there is a lack of studies measuring the construct of process orientation by means of whether the process approach is actually

lived

in the organization. This paper empirically explores the relationship between a corporate culture in line with business process orientation and firm performance in industrial settings. The empirical evidence indicates that firms which actually live the process approach are outperforming other firms in terms of financial firm performance, delivery time, and delivery reliability.

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) support modeling and execution of business processes, but they lack to define a criteria that can be used to determine how successfully certain processes are being performed by authorized agents. As a consequence, agents go on and on with their work even they have a poor success history and thus cause a process to become inefficient. Therefore, this paper introduces means for including goal modeling into workflow modeling, enabling a WfMS not only to support performance evaluation mechanisms but also to select those agents for a certain task who will most likely be performing best.

In this paper, we show how experiments on the understandability of business process models can depend on the exact wording used in the experiments’ questionnaires. For this purpose, we partially replicated a published experiment. We asked a group of students a number of questions on relations between tasks in a business process model. Alternatively, we used a set of modified questions which were aimed to ask for exactly the same relations. The result was that there was a significant difference in the number of correct answers between the two systems to construct a question. We argue that a non-negligible part of the wrong answers given in the experiment did not result from problems to understand the model, but rather from problems to understand the question. It follows that it is dangerous to draw conclusions from such an experiment until enough effort has been taken to select appropriate questions.

Designing human-centric processes is complex. It involves the definition of interactions between humans and machines, interactions between machines and machines, information transfer, and scenarios based on decisions taken by both humans and machines. Traditionally, designing such processes is performed by design experts who define the processes in a way that mimics a bird’s eye view of it, usually expressed by a graph composed of nodes and arrows. In this work, we suggest a design approach based on the way that a process is perceived by the users who participate in it. We present a novel approach termed “What You See And Do Is What You Get” that enables defining an entire human-centric process with a lowered expertise entry bar for process designers. Further, we present a model-driven, web-based tool that realizes the presented design approach and enables fast development of applications that support human-centric processes.

Process modeling is an important design practice in intra- as well as inter-organizational process improvement projects. Inter-organizational process modeling often requires collaboration support for distributed participants. We present the results of a preliminary exploratory of study of process modeling on basis of collaborative technology. We examine a group of process modelers that rely on a collaborative modeling editor to complete two process modeling tasks in distributed settings. We examine how the participants learn to appropriate the technology, the key phases and tasks of collaborative process modeling, the breakdowns encountered and workarounds employed by the participants. With our study, we provide a first understanding of the IT-enabled process of process modeling, and detail a set of guidelines and implications for the research and design of collaborative process modeling.

Compliance of business processes with authoritative rules is significantly important to avoid financial penalties, efficiency problems, and reputation damages. However, finding the right measures to evaluate and track compliance is very challenging. We propose a novel method to model the context and measure compliance using the User Requirements Notation (URN). We mainly use Key Performance Indicator (KPI) extensions of URN to measure the level of compliance to rules. Such KPIs have been used in the past to measure the satisfaction level of goals and the performance of business processes. Yet, they have never been used for measuring compliance. Our method highlights the non-compliant policies and rules on a quadrant map based on their importance and compliance levels. Furthermore, we suggest a new method for importance calculation in this context. We use a human resource policy example to illustrate our method.

Business Process Management has gained importance within organizations due to the need to streamline their operations. Nevertheless, despite the existence of process modeling standards such as BPMN, nowadays it is difficult to specify complex temporal constraints and relationships among tasks of a given process, which prevents the specification and subsequent automation of processes where these restrictions are relevant. To solve the exposed difficulty, we have resorted to the project planning and management field, developing a BPMN equivalency of all temporal constraints and relationships that can be specified in a standard project planning tool: Microsoft Project. This not only enables a simple interface for specifying complex temporal restrictions in business processes, but also defines an execution semantic for the models developed in the field of project planning, allowing their later automation through process execution engines.

Recent studies have started to explore context-awareness as a driver in the design of adaptable business processes. The emerging challenge of identifying and considering contextual drivers in the environment of a business process are well understood, however, typical methods and models for business process design do not yet consider this context. In this paper, we describe our work on the design of a method framework and appropriate models to enable a context-aware process design approach. We report on our ongoing work with an Australian insurance provider and describe the design science we employed to develop innovative and useful artifacts as part of a context-aware method framework. We discuss the utility of these artifacts in an application in the claims handling process at the case organization.

Process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial knowledge and interesting insights from event logs. Process models can be seen as the “maps” describing the operational processes of organizations. Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with less-structured processes. Furthermore, existing discovery algorithms do not consider the analyst’s context of analysis. As a result, the current models (i.e., “maps”) are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. To address this problem, we propose a two-phase approach based on common execution patterns. First, the user selects relevant and context-dependent patterns. These patterns are used to obtain an event log at a higher abstraction level. Subsequently, the transformed log is used to create a hierarchical process map. The approach has been implemented in the context of ProM. Using a real-life log of a housing agency we demonstrate that we can use this approach to create maps that (i)

depict desired traits

, (ii)

eliminate irrelevant details

, (iii)

reduce complexity

, and (iv)

improve comprehensibility

.

The growing complexity of processes in many organizations stimulates the adoption of business process management (BPM) techniques. Process models typically lie at the basis of these techniques and generally, the assumption is made that the operational business processes as they are taking place in practice conform to these models. However, recent experience has shown that this often isn’t the case. Therefore, the problem of checking to what extent the operational process conforms to the process model is increasingly important.

In this paper, we present a robust approach to get insights into the conformance of an operational process to a given process model. We use logs that carry information about which activities have being performed, in which order and we compare these logs to an abstract model. We do not only provide several different conformance metrics, but we show an efficient implementation for the calculation of these metrics.

Our approach has been implemented in the ProM framework, evaluated using simulated event logs and compared against an existing conformance technique based on Petri nets.

In today’s changing business environment, flexible Process-aware Information Systems (PAISs) are required to allow companies to rapidly adjust their business processes to changes in the environment. However, increasing flexibility poses additional challenges to the users of flexible PAISs and thus requires intelligent user assistance. To address this challenge we have previously proposed a recommendation service for supporting users during process execution by providing recommendations on possible next steps. Recommendations are generated based on similar past process executions considering the performance goal of the supported process. This paper follows up on this work and suggests additional strategies for generating recommendations. In addition, as major contribution of this paper, we investigate how effectively the recommendation strategies work for different processes and logs of different quality.

Business processes involve data that can be modified or updated by various activities. These data must satisfy the business rules associated to the process. These data are normally stored in a relational database, and hence the database has to be analyzed to determine whether the business rules can be satisfied.

This paper presents a framework including a run-time auditing layer where the correctness of a database can be analyzed at different checkpoints of a business process according to the data flow. It provides an early detection of incorrect action on stored data. Furthermore, in order to manage the current business rules, the use of the constraint programming paradigm is proposed and the enlargement of the Constraint Database Management Systems to support business rules.

The development of a well-defined evaluation framework for process discovery techniques is definitely one of the most important challenges within this subdomain of process mining. Any researcher in the field will acknowledge that such a framework is vital. With this paper, we aim to provide a tangible analysis of the currently available model-log evaluation metrics for mined control-flow models. Also, we will indicate strengths and weaknesses of the existing metrics and propose a number of opportunities for future research.

During the initialization and execution of a process instance, multiple events occur which may be of interest to a business, including events that relate to the instantiation and completion of process activities, internal process engine operations and other system and application functions. Process mining and other analytical techniques often involve extracting this process history data from a process execution environment and submitting the data to the process analytics environment for processing. We present the Business Process Analytics Format, an XML-based interchange format for process audit events that combines an extensible state model with a robust XML representation, is able to accommodate multiple event originators and can map to the popular MXML format used in process mining applications.

Discovering the Business Process (BP) model underpinning existing practices through analysis of event logs, allows users to understand, analyse and modify the process. But, to be useful, the BP model must be kept in line with practice throughout its lifetime, as changes occur to the business objectives, technologies and quality programs. Current techniques require users to manually revise the BP to account for discrepancies between the practice and the model, which is a laborious, costly and error prone task. We propose an automated approach for resolving such discrepancies by minimally revising a BP model to bring it in line with the activities corresponding to its executions, based on a non-monotonic inductive learning system. We discuss our implementation of this approach and demonstrate its application to a case-study. We further contrast our approach with existing BP discovery techniques to show that

BP revision

offers significant advantages over

BP discovery

in practical use.

The management and automation of business processes have become an essential task within IT organizations, where the diagnosis is a very important issue, since it enables fault isolation in a business process. The diagnosis process uses a set of test points (observations) and a model in order to explain a wrong behavior. In this work, an algorithm to allocate test points is presented, where the key idea is to improve the diagnosability, getting a better computational complexity for isolating faults in the activities of business processes.

Information systems are ageing over time and become legacy information systems which often embed business knowledge that is not present in any other artifact. This embedded knowledge must be preserved to align the modernized versions of the legacy systems with the current business processes of an organization. Process mining is a powerful tool to discover and preserve business knowledge. Most process mining techniques and tools use event logs, registered during execution of process-aware information systems, as the key source of knowledge. Unfortunately, the majority of traditional information systems is not process-aware and does not have any built-in logging mechanisms. Thus, this paper defines the main challenges to be addressed as well as a preliminary solution to obtain event logs from traditional systems. The solution consists of a technique that statically analyzes the source code and modifies it in a non-invasive way. Finally, the modified source code enables the event log registration at runtime based on dynamic source code analysis.

Some approaches to support decision making in the context of business process management exist since a couple of years. Most of them are not systemized. This fact leads to the necessity of a classification of this broad area. The paper´s objective is to evaluate and differentiate approaches of Business Process Intelligence (BPI) within the last decade. The results of this analysis are a morphological box and a definition to clarify potentials of Business Process Intelligence. The definition integrates the most frequently used characteristics as well as different understandings of BPI and it indicates a holistic view on the dimensions of this area. Additionally, the literature-based propositions regarding current shifts provide the author´s perspective to the field of BPI and point out a guideline for further research.

Evaluating process mining algorithms would require the availability of a suite of real-world business processes and their execution logs, which hardly are available. In this paper we propose an approach for the random generation of business processes and their execution logs. The proposed approach is based on the generation of process descriptions via a stochastic context-free grammar whose definition is based on well-known process patterns. An algorithm for the generation of execution instances is also proposed. The implemented tools are publicly available.

The main objective of the rBPM workshop was to provide a forum to be discussed systematic reuse techiniques applied to BPM domain. Already in its first edition, the workshop could be considered as having achieved great results. Technical papers of very good quality have been submitted, of which 9 full papers and 2 work in progress papers were accepted (with a 46% of acceptance rate), bringing together researchers of high quality during the workshop day. Moreover, a keynote given by Professor Dr Manfred Reichert from University of Ulm in Germany was an important contribution for all the workshop attenders to improve their knowledge regarding “Reuse in the Business Process Lifecycle: Challenges, Methods, Technologies”.

Best practices frameworks such as ITIL provide a generic description of best practice processes that are intended to be followed by people. These processes are refined into more concrete steps before they are actionable. The refinement often is specific to the organization where the process is adopted, as well as people who are enacting the process. Modeling best practice processes is challenging. On one hand, these processes need a high-level, abstract representation. Current process modeling languages are too rigid for modeling them. On the other hand, automation of the enactment of these processes among people requires formal models. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling best practice processes at three levels: user-level, formal process model level and machine representation level to support the collaborative and ad-hoc refinement of process models as well as the automation of their enactments. We also propose an approach to learn from the past enactments of processes to enable reuse of organizational domain knowledge.

At IBM, we recognize that our processes are our business. This is especially true in the area of IT Delivery where we have long been focused on the management and reuse of process assets. The current economic climate and advances in technology are rapidly driving IT Delivery to a truly global model. This transition greatly expands the scope of the process assets which need to be managed at a global level to include even the lowest level processes for service delivery. Customers, many of whom are also global, expect consistent quality and reasonable cost, regardless of from where services are delivered. The global management and reuse of IT Delivery process assets at all levels is no longer a desired objective but rather a business imperative. In this paper, we describe a system we are developing to manage, govern, and evolve process assets on a global scale by leveraging expertise of the entire IT Delivery community. We describe the history of the effort, the business drivers, the challenges and solutions we have devised, as well as future work.

Nowadays, business process reuse is very important and necessary inside large organizations that continually increase their process collections. Therefore, an efficient system to manage and search for concrete and relevant processes is necessary. Here we overcome to this problem proposing business process model retrieval based on a Graph Indexing Method. It takes into account a measure similarity between two graphs and provides a ranking of business process retrieved.

Organizations maintain large repositories of business process models. While maintenance and management of these repositories are challenging, they also offer opportunities when used as a knowledge base systematically. For instance, repositories can be leveraged to provide modeling support and, therefore, help to assure the consistency of newly created models with the existing ones. In the previous work we have introduced action patterns as reusable blocks of process models that can be derived from a model repository. In this paper we advance the initial results interpreting the action concept as a composition of a verb and a business object. The subsequently identified action pattern types allow for fine-grained modeling support. We evaluate the novel concepts and compare them to the established action patterns using as a benchmark the SAP Reference Model, the real world process model collection.

Today’s business applications demand high flexibility in processing information and extracting knowledge from data. Thus, data mining becomes more and more an integral part of operating a business. However, the integration of data mining into business processes still requires a lot of coordination and manual adjustment. This paper aims at reducing this effort by reusing successful data mining solutions. We describe a novel approach on facilitating the integration based on process patterns for data mining and demonstrate that these patterns allow for easy reuse and can significantly speed up the process of integration. We empirically evaluate our approach in a case study of fraud detection in the health care domain.

In order to compete in effectively nowadays an organization has to offer a variety of process to fulfill the individual requirements of the different customers. The management of the process variability is an important aspect not only during execution, but already during modeling. One common way to deal with this is configuration. This paper presents a generic concept of process configuration which does not solely focus on the functional aspect, but also considers others such as, for example, the organizational, operational and data oriented aspects. Furthermore, different levels of abstraction are introduced to further structure the configuration process. At modeling time it is differentiated between process families (a set of variants) and individual variants themselves; concerned with modeling and execution time between variants and alternatives.

Today’s enterprises are dynamic where many variances of business process models can exist due to several reasons such as: the need to target different customer types, rely on particular IT systems or comply with specific country regulations. Automated maintenance of the consistency between process variants is an important goal that saves the time and efforts of process modelers. In this paper, we present a query-based approach to maintain consistency among process variants. We maintain the link between the variant process models by means of defining process model views. These views are defined using, BPMN-Q, a visual query language for business process models. Therefore, dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantee that the process modeler is able to get up-to-date and consistent status of the process model. In addition, our view-based approach allows the building of a holistic view of related variants of the same process model.

Managing variability in business processes has attracted a lot of research interest. Some of the current works try to manage variability at runtime and others at design time. We are interested in the latter where it consists of managing different process variants in order to enable their reuse. Even though there exist different proposals dealing with variability at design time most of them suffer from the major shortcoming of decision support in choosing the suitable alternatives. In this context, we propose a framework that allows for reusing business process models by means of a hierarchical structure. In this paper, we present our ongoing research in defining this framework: its data structure as well as first thoughts about maintaining it.

Traditionally, businesses have used IT systems as mechanical advantage for automating static a-priori-defined repetitive tasks. Increased business dynamics has placed greater demands of adaptation and agility on to IT systems. Service oriented architecture is a step in this direction through separation of business process concerns from application functionality. There have been multiple attempts at improving adaptability of application services with varying degrees of success. But current business process modeling languages and execution platforms can at best support optimal point solutions that are not amenable for agile adaptation. Application services have benefited to some extent, from product-line architectures related to adaptation to a-priori known situations. We can apply the same idea to business processes. An extension of essential BPMN meta model supporting business process families, and a set of adaptation operators are presented in this paper. We describe their realization using model-driven techniques.

Business process model discovery represents a pillar technique that enables business process model reuse. In this paper we describe a method for business process model discovery, which uses semantically annotated business processes. We created an RDF vocabulary for business processes that captures functional, non functional and structural properties that is used in the annotations of basic activities. We developed a set of algorithms to automatically generate different representations of the same business process at different granularity levels. We defined a set of rules to extract the RDF meta data in the annotated business process models and to build an RDF knowledge base which then can be interrogated using SPARQL.

Many companies opt for reusing existing software development artifacts due to the benefits of the reuse such as increasing productivity, shortening time-to-market, and spending less time for testing, debugging, to name but a few. Unfortunately, reusing artifacts in existing process-driven SOA technologies is cumbersome and hard to achieve due to several inhibitors. First, the languages used for business process development are not intentionally designed for reuse. Second, numerous tangled process concerns embraced in a process description significantly hinder the understanding and reusing of its concepts and elements. Third, there is a lack of appropriate methods and techniques for integrating reusable artifacts. In our previous work, we proposed a view-based, model-driven approach for addressing the two former challenges. We present in this paper a named-based view integration approach aiming at solving the third one. Preliminary qualitative and quantitative evaluations of four use cases extracted from industrial processes show that this approach can enhance the flexibility and automation of reusing process development artifacts.

Social software [1] is a new paradigm that is spreading quickly in society, organizations and economics. Social software has created a multitude of success stories such as wikipedia.org and the development of the Linux operating system. Therefore, more and more enterprises regard social software as a means for further improvement of their business processes and business models. For example, they integrate their customers into product development by using blogs to capture ideas for new products and features. Thus, business processes have to be adapted to new communication patterns between customers and the enterprise: for example, the communication with the customer is increasingly a bi-directional communication with the customer and among the customers. Social software also offers new possibilities to enhance business processes by improving the exchange of knowledge and information, to speed up decisions, etc. Social software is based on four principles: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning.

Enhancing business processes by the integration of social software is an area of active research. Once such integration has occurred, a new problem is presented - that of using social data in an effective manner. With large amounts of user generated data created, finding relevance in both data and in the people who created it as part of a business process becomes problematic. This paper frames the problem of socially generated information in the context of Open Source software development processes and of improved execution of tasks in that domain. Such social processes highlight the research area of facilitating the automatic selection of relevant data as part of a larger process. The paper introduces a novel two stage mechanism to answer such a problem. The approach is built on the concept of using the implicit social connections available from socially generated data artefacts to create a weighting model. This methodology is inherently egalitarian in nature as it uses a folksonomical strategy to construct the model. A dynamic domain specific lexicon is created to improve term weighting relevance. This weighting is then enhanced by analysing implicit proximity between participants of the socially generated production. By combining these two methods within a software framework, finding relevancy within a large corpus of socially generated data is improved. The prototype software framework built on these two approaches is constructed to provide dynamic programatic access to social data which can be incorporated as part of a larger business process to speed up the decision making process.

Contemporary social software and business process support systems utilize different architectural principals. While social software employs the idea of shared spaces for communication/collaboration, most of the contemporary business process support systems employ a workflow engine to coordinate the work of people engaged in the given business process. There are two alternatives when developing a system that provides business process support enhanced with properties of social software. One alternative is to create a mixed shared spaces/workflow architecture. The other alternative is to find a way of both type of systems using the same architectural principle, either shared spaces, or workflow, before trying to merge the two types of systems into one. The paper explores the second alternative, namely, first, moving business process support to the shared spaces architecture, and then adding features typical for social software. The paper discusses the role of shared spaces in business process support systems, sets requirements on their structure and usage, and outlines potential benefits of using shared spaces from the business point of view. Then, the paper shows how the requirements set on the structure and usage of the shared spaces can be implemented in practice, and how typical features such as blogs/forums found in social software can be naturally introduced into a business process support system.

Recent research has shown the need to include unstructured ad-hoc processes into business process management. A possible solution for this purpose is Case Management, where information related to a certain process instance is bundled into a case file. In addition to existing top-down approaches, this paper suggests a bottom-up view on Case Management that leverages emergent user-driven case handling. We theoretically derive characteristics of such a system and demonstrate the approach based on a toolset of current Social Software techniques including microblogging, activity streams and tagging.

Recently, a trend toward collaborative, on-line business process modeling can be observed that is also emphasized by several initiatives. Social software has the potential satisfying such a collaborative modeling. It provides tools to collaboratively exchange and share information resources among peers. Despite of the potential that social software has, it is insufficiently used as work resource (e.g., for help requests or partner search) due to a low integration of social software into the workflow management system. The aim of this paper is to exploit Wikis and social networks for the coordination of collaborative process activities. Wikis are suggested in order to reduce the model design phase. A technique will be introduced that allows visualizing a process model from Wiki pages. The connection of process activities with social networks supports browsing for suitable process collaborators. A coordination model will be introduced that governs the collaboration.

Nowadays, Business Process Management (BPM) is considering new approaches that use collaborative environments to involve all types of business process stakeholders in the improvement of the organization’s business functions. Nevertheless, when evolving different types of stakeholders, the language gap existing between them is disregarded. Also, these new approaches are only focusing on the top-down strategy since they only allow for such collaboration to occur at business process modeling environments. In this paper, we propose ECHO as an evolutive vocabulary system that focus on the formalization of informal entities supporting both strategies of top-down and bottom-up. ECHO’s main objective is to support the evolutive process of formalization of the new business process entities that emerge within the stakeholders’ discussions. The main function of those informal entities called concepts is to provide a common language that acts as a “bridge” over the gap existing between the business process stakeholder’s individual languages.

The Case Management Process Modeling RFP released by OMG in 2009 expresses the particular demand of practitioners in the case management solutions. The case is defined as “a situation, set of circumstances or initiative that requires a set of actions to achieve an acceptable outcome or objective.” In this paper we consider an example of the case management process - the mortgage approval process. We formulate 5 challenges encountered while modeling this process using a traditional, activity-oriented modeling formalism, i.e. BPMN. We argue that the research methodologies developed during the past decades can be successfully applied to case management modeling. We propose the use of declarative specifications, variability modeling, and FOL-based semantics for modeling descriptive processes and, in particular, case management processes. We assemble these theoretical concepts in the form of DeCo process specifications that extend the BPMN notation.

Existing process modelling languages and especially executable process modelling languages are not designed for business users without programming knowledge. We therefore propose a novel Lightweight Process Modelling seeking to lower the entrance barrier for modelling executable processes. In this sense lightweight applies to the user interaction and means easy to understand in the context of the modelling language and easy to deploy, implement, and execute processes in a tooling context. Hence business users get advanced guidance during their modelling activities. This paper will provide a specification of a Lightweight Process Modelling process and the Language for Lightweight Process Modelling (LLPM). The LLPM formal semantic core is fairly rich, but it is designed to be rendered in a simple graphical form without undue loss of semantics. To achieve this we followed three design principles of lightweight modelling when supporting a business user: abstracting from executable process details, using semantic annotations, and reusing process parts through patterns and templates. In order to realize these design principles we have created new elements for the LLPM that are not yet implemented in existing process modelling languages. Selected concepts of existing process modelling languages like BPMN and BPEL complement the LLPM. In this paper we present a coherent specification of the elements, properties, and relationships. Further a design process is defined revealing the steps of enhancing the abstract graphical process models with execution details.

Current approaches to support stakeholder’s collaboration in the modelling of business processes envision an egalitarian environment where stakeholders interact in the same context, using the same languages and sharing the same perspectives on the business process. However, these approaches ignore that Business Process Management (BPM) includes diverse stakeholders groups, such as end users that operate the business, business experts that understand the overall impact of business processes and process experts that master process design and analysis techniques. Therefore, such stakeholders have to collaborate in the context of process modelling using a language that some of them do not master, and integrate their various perspectives. In this paper we propose the

Processpedia

approach to foster effective collaboration among stakeholders without enforcing egalitarianism.

Processpedia

intends to be an ecological collaboration environment for knowledge production by capitalising on stakeholders’ distinctive characteristics.

The aim of this workshop was to further the discussion of the role of BPM for the sustainable development of organizations. Our intention was to provide thought leaders with a forum where they can contribute to defining and shaping this emergent, and arguably highly relevant, research domain. The workshop attracted 11 submissions of which 6 papers were selected for presentation after a highly competitive review process. Two out of the six papers tackle sustainability from a BPM perspective at a rather general level: Constantin Houy, Markus Reiter, Peter Fettke, and Peter Loos focus on the ecological dimension and discuss how BPM approaches can be leveraged to support sustainability and resource efficiency of IT supported business activities. Getachew Hailemariam and Jan vom Brocke conceptualize the sustainability of BPM initiatives per se, thus focusing on the economic dimension. The other four papers that were accepted pertain to sustainability measurement. Anne Cleven, Robert Winter, and Felix Wortmann propose an approach to process performance management with particular consideration of social, ecological, and economic dimensions. Nicole Zeise, Marco Link, and Erich Ortner also consider all three dimensions when they discuss how dynamic indicators can be used in order to control all levels of enterprise architectures. Jan Recker, Michael Rosemann, and Ehsan Roohi Gohar focus on the ecologic dimension and propose an approach to measure the carbon footprint caused during the execution of a business process. Finally, Wube Alemayehu and Jan vom Brocke discuss the role of ecological and social aspects in the performance measurement of an Ethiopian airline.

This paper presents the findings of an investigation of sustainable performance measurement practices at Ethiopian Airlines. Evidence was gathered through structured interviews conducted with key informants of the airline and document reviews. Reports were assessed with respect to sustainable performance measurement system. The paper demonstrates that, despite the availability of economic performance indicators, there are no measurements concerning the social and environmental performance. However there is some operational practice related to social and environmental responsibility of the airline. The research contributes values to two areas: First, it shares some experience in measuring sustainable performance of the airline or their practical involvement in social and environmental responsibility. Second, it tries to help decision makers – based on the example of Ethiopian Airline –to better understand the level of maturity of their sustainable performance measurement and, thus, to improve decision making through a “sustainability lens”.

Sustainable development, the sustainable organization and sustainability strategies

are all terms that are being intensely discussed in the business community just now. Nonetheless, the concept of sustainability still remains vague. Especially its meaning and implications for the field of Business Process Management (BPM) are as of yet by and large unclear. In this paper we set out to advance the understanding of economic sustainability in the context of BPM. We argue that Process Performance Management (PPM) represents a basic approach for establishing and maintaining economic sustainability in BPM. Although the economic dimension of sustainability is commonly believed to have the highest maturity an empirical investigation reveals that organizations are experiencing major difficulties with its implementation(in particular on a process level. Based on the findings, we propose a research agenda for future research efforts in this field.

Modern Business Process Management (BPM) is a comprehensive approach for improving business performance by managing end-to-end business processes. It tends to embrace both, radical redesign and continual improvement of business processes. While a plethora of methods for BPM exist, single BPM initiatives still often struggle to prove successful in practice. Hence, with this study we set out to examine the concept of BPM success. We draw from a stakeholder theory and argue that BPM initiatives need to take the perspective of multiple stakeholders (e. g. managers, shareholders, employees) into account in order to prove successful. We evaluate our model within the case of a large scale BPM project in the Ethiopian public sector. Ethiopia is one of the countries that have recognized the need for change in the public sector and have tried to adopt BPM models as a viable radical change instrument. The implementation did show improvement, yet, it remains doubtful how far the initiative can be successfully evaluated. First we present results from applying our BPM sustainability framework and subsequently outline opportunities for future research.

The sustainability of organizations’ business activities is gaining increasing importance. Taking the debate on global warming seriously into account, organizations put more effort in improving their sustainability. One central aspect in the debate on global warming is the energy efficiency of information technology (IT) infrastructures. As the energy consumption based on IT has dramatically increased with the development of the Internet in recent years, IT is considered as a part of the problem. IT can however be part of the solution. In order to improve the efficiency and sustainability of information processing, the concept of Green IT offers a set of possible approaches. In our contribution we argue that applying approaches from the field of Business Process Management (BPM) can support Green IT initiatives and thus the sustainability and resource efficiency of IT-supported business activities in general. The application of BPM approaches in the Green IT context requires new methods and techniques which are named Green BPM in this paper. However, the discussion on sustainability through Green BPM is still in its early stages and only rudimentary techniques exist so far. Our contribution aims at illuminating and discussing opportunities and challenges of Green BPM based on conceptual considerations.

While many corporations and individuals realize that environmental sustainability is an urgent problem to address, the academic community has been slow to acknowledge the problem and take action. We contribute to the emerging academic discussion by proposing a new approach for engaging in the analysis of environmentally sustainable business processes. Specifically, we propose an approach for measuring the carbon dioxide emissions produced during the execution of a business process, and apply this approach in a real-life case of a Direct Invoicing process at a Corporate Services provider. We show how this information can be leveraged in the re-design of “green” business processes.

Controlling of enterprises is an important step to realize dynamic reactions. Therefore adequate indicator-systems have to be established. Modeling of these indicator-systems in the sense of sustainability offers a basis to use the term “sustainability” not just as a marketing buzz-word. The specific indicator- or attribute-system should be implemented in a way which ensures the control of all levels of enterprise architectures. The goal of the paper is to show on the one hand a language based approach to develop indicator-systems as well as its possible effects to the modeled process-system on the other hand.

Due to the increasing adoption of business process management and the key role of process models, companies are setting up and maintaining large process model repositories. Repositories containing hundreds or thousands of process models are not uncommon, whereas only simplistic search functionality, such as text based search or folder navigation, is provided, today.

On the other hand, advanced methods have recently been proposed in the literature to ascertain the similarity of process models. However, due to performance reasons, an exhaustive similarity search by pairwise comparison is not feasible in large process model repositories.

This paper presents an indexing approach based on metric trees, a hierarchical search structure that saves comparison operations during search with nothing but a distance function at hand. A detailed investigation of this approach is provided along with a quantitative evaluation thereof, showing its suitability and scalability in large process model repositories.

Due to changing market conditions and resulting flexibility requirements, the reference-conform implementation of processes in companies increasingly gains importance. The internal assessment of the realisation of reference processes (process conformance) is a resource-intensive task in terms of time and cost. The paper at hand presents a process model analysis method to address this issue using a combined structural and semantic comparison and analysis approach. The method provides decision support for process analysts concerning the adjustment of processes to reference processes in IT Governance contexts.

Paper category:

Research in progress.

Large organizations often run hundreds or even thousands of business processes. Managing such large collections of business processes is a challenging task. Intelligent software can assist in that task by providing common repository functions such as storage, search and version management. They can also provide advanced functions that are specific for managing collections of process models, such as managing the consistency of public and private processes and extracting knowledge from existing processes to better design new processes. This paper, by analyzing existing business process model repositories, proposes a framework for repositories that assist in managing large collections of business process models. The framework consists of a management model and a reference architecture. The management model lists the functionality that can be provided by business process model repositories. The reference architecture presents the components that provide this functionality and their interconnections. The framework provides a reference model for analysis and extension of existing repositories and design of new repositories.

On September 13

th

, 2010, the 1

st

International Workshop on

Cross Enterprise Collaboration, People and Work

(SG-PAW) was held as part of the 8

th

International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 10) in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. The workshop focused on the problem of enabling an enterprise to leverage internal and external global services and combine them in new ways that optimize its end-to-end operations. The goal was to combine academics and practitioners to identify together core issues, research challenges, learn from successful attempts or approaches, and propose new formalisms, models, architectures, frameworks, methodologies, or approaches.

Many of today’s development and manufacturing projects are so complex that they cannot be conducted only by one company anymore. Such collaborations are mostly modeled and executed using business processes. Business processes are increasingly controlled automatically by IT-systems, but they still consist of many tasks that have to be performed by people. Collaborations using business process are are widely discussed in the context of choreographies and subprocesses. However, collaborations on human task level are discussed much less. The goal of this work is to lay a foundation of a cross-organizational federated task management infrastructure, which supports collaborations on task level.

The pressure to increase organizational transparency, the rise of proper IT support for regulative activities and the increasing cost of regulation are a few notable drivers that stress the significance of cross-enterprise regulation. Compliance to regulations fuels the added-value that business processes represent and prevents judiciary pursuits. Norm enforcement mechanisms are used to determine whether organizations have complied with the regulations or norms, which can be divided into mechanisms that are oriented towards direct control and mechanisms that are oriented towards self regulation. When designing a system to support agents in norm fulfillment and enforcement, the relation between norm enforcement mechanisms and the abstract values that are behind them should be explicitly incorporated in the development of the system. In this paper, a first step in the development of such a value-sensitive system is taken by formalizing the values of direct control and self regulation. The paper also outlines the following steps that are necessary to complete the development of the proposed value-sensitive system process towards a full system implementation.

Software testing claims a big amount of software development costs as a rule. Particularly, manually operated software tests are on the critical path during realising a software product since the execution of these tests is very time-consuming. Furthermore, it is cumbersome for domain experts to participate in the development process since they have a low level of software engineering knowledge. However, their participation is important and a crucial factor to success since they have the domain expertise.

In this paper we propose an approach that enables domain experts to generate test cases alongside business processes. Our contribution targets a holistic approach that supports the modelling of the graphical user interface (GUI) for web-based information systems, the generation of test cases from modelled business processes, the automated execution of the generated test cases, and the reporting of test results, which includes a backtracking of the results to the respective elements within the workflows of the business process.

Service Engineering has appeared as a paradigm where businesses can easily collaborate and take advantage of services provided by other organizations or third-party entities for efficient delivery of software-solutions. Although the open-ended landscape of service engineering provides high degrees of flexibility, it also leads to extreme diversity in terms of service development environments, service configuration mechanisms, etc. The number of service variants that arise from such diversity can increase tremendously and potentially can be unbounded. In this paper, we highlight the challenges arising from unbounded variability and present a vision of how it may be tamed without compromising the flexibility afforded by the open-ended nature of service engineering.

A big number of concepts have been developed in the past to address the traceability of business data throughout business processes. Business process monitoring and controlling, business activity monitoring, provenance analysis, etc., describe techniques how to capture event-driven data in business processes. Nevertheless, current workflow systems only achieve a technical integration with some applications and services in the enterprise context, but not all of them. Moreover, a common semantic concept in terms of a context model is crucial to assess event-driven changes in a model-specific manner. The presented work develops an extensible semantic context model for business process management and proposes an architecture for integrating event-driven changes from various data sources and augmenting these events, in order to derive appropriate courses of action.

This paper argues that an explicit account of rationale is essential for the effective management and evolution of semi-structured processes. Our approach is based on a view of semi-structured process models as unfinished products whose design is implicitly completed through their execution by process model users. The resulting refinements and modifications of the process models are instances of user-driven design innovation. Our framework shows how rationale can explain a user’s individual execution decisions, as a basis for process modelers to improve the original process specifications. We propose and illustrate the ontological foundations of a modeling approach.

The goal of our work is to examine the utility of predictive analytics for case-oriented semi-structured business processes. As a first step towards this goal, this paper describes an approach to leverage case history to predict outcomes at decision points in case-oriented semi-structured processes, and examine how the contents of documents at these decision points influence their outcomes. We apply an ant-colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm to create a probabilistic activity graph from traces, and use it to identify key decision points in a given process. For each activity node that represents a decision point in the mined probabilistic graph, the likelihood of different outcomes from the node can be correlated with the contents of documents accessed by the activity node. This is achieved by using a standard decision tree learning algorithm. We validate our approach on correlated case instance traces generated by a simulator that we constructed to implement non-deterministic executions of an automobile insurance claims scenario. In practice we find that our approach can lead to useful predictions at different stages of execution in a semi-structured case oriented process.

The success of today’s business operations depends largely on the ability to react to changing factors of influence. With the increasing distribution and heterogeneity of enterprise applications, the challenge is to gain and sustain oversight and to manage the different aspects of business operations systematically. Many disciplines and best practices have been established: On the infrastructure level, Service oriented architectures provide a common base to compose distributed applications. On the operational level, business process management provides high level visibility of end-to-end transactions. On the information level, master data management aggregates and consolidates data throughout the organization. There is, however, an aspect that is becoming more and more relevant but still lacks a proper discipline: Regulatory compliance of business operations. The pressure to prove compliance with legal obligations and industry wide requirements has risen tremendously in recent years – and in light of the ongoing economic crises it is likely to rise further. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic development method to define, deploy and monitor business controls across a distributed enterprise application. First, we establish a repository of obligations that keeps track of the dependencies between processes, data, applications, and regulations. Second, we define and deploy operational controls as a set of services to gather, classify and correlate information. Finally, we provide end-to-end visibility of the business transactions for monitoring and reporting.

Manufacturing enterprises strive for improvements in their monitoring and control of enterprise processes (i.e., business and manufacturing processes) with intention to sustain competitive advantages, and achieve higher degree of flexibility and adaptability of enterprise processes. Hence in the current contribution, a framework based on event driven architecture is elaborated which can be employed to realize enterprise integration, and enhance online monitoring and control of enterprise processes. A process model is been presented that assists the introduction, configuration and implementation of the envisaged framework. The framework is composed of following components: data collection engine, data aggregation engine, process database, complex event processing engine, and process visualization clients. Finally, the framework has been validated in an industrial scenario.

New modeling approaches appeared in the last decade based on the premise that process structures in data-intensive landscapes are pushed by data-driven events. However, since emergent approaches as

artifact-centered

,

data-driven

,

product-based

and

document-based

modeling cover reduced subsets of all data-related needs, they have a limited practical impact [13]. This work structures the set of requirements to model responsive data-intensive systems, studies the emergent object-centered approaches to retrieve a set of principles and, finally, defines a solution direction, centered in expressive object models and in model transformations, for the support of the introduced principles.

Today, in the state of the art process engine solutions, process models are executed by a central orchestrator (i.e. one per process). There are however a lot of drawbacks in using a central coordinator, including a single point of failure and performance degradation. Decentralization algorithms that distribute the workload of the central orchestrator exist, but they still suffer from a tight coupling and therefore decreased scalability. In this paper, we aim to investigate the benefits of using an event driven architecture to support the communication in a decentralized orchestration. This accomplishes space and time decoupling of the process coordinators and hereby creates autonomous fine grained self-serving process engines. Benefits include an increased scalability and availability of the global process flow.

The growing of business market dictates new requirements of agility to the business process environment. An event-driven approach can deal with this issue since an event can be defined as a significant change in the state of a system or an environment. This paper is focused on the combination of the event-driven approach and the business process modeling one by developing a cloud-enabled event-based business process editor and simulator. BPMN2.0 is the relevant business process formalism used since it can represent graphically various kind of operating activities and events.

The modern advertisement theory is based on the “contextual priming effects”: the product attributes primed by the ad context may result in the formation or change of beliefs about the advertised brand, thereby affecting consumers’ evaluations of the brand. Therefore, a web ad should be tailored as much as possible to the user’s current context (interests) in order to affect the user’ attention appropriately. In this paper we present an approach for the semantic-based personalized advertising on the web.

Business rules define and constrain various aspects of the business, such as vocabulary, behavior and organizational issues. Enforcing the rules of the business in information systems is however not straightforward, because different mechanisms exist for the (semi-) automatic transformation of various business constraints and rules. In this paper, we examine if and how business rules, not only data rules, but also process rules, timing rules, authorization rules, etc., can be expressed in SBVR and translated using patterns into a more uniform event mechanism, such that the event handling could provide an integrated enforcement of business rules of many kinds.

Complex event processing emerged as a technology that promises tight integration of business process management with the flow of products in a supply chain. As part of that, complex event querying is used to monitor and analyse streams of events. The amount of data that needs to be processed along with the distribution of the event-emitting sources impose serious challenges for efficient event querying mechanisms. In this paper, we assume that the business process to which the events relate is defined in terms of a normative process model. Based thereon, we show how this knowledge can be leveraged to optimise complex event queries and their processing. To this end, we use the formal concept of behavioural profiles as a behavioural abstraction of the process model.

Business Process Management (BPM) is rapidly evolving as an established discipline. There are a number of efforts underway to formalize the various aspects of BPM practice; creating a formal Body of Knowledge (BoK) is one such effort. Bodies of knowledge are artifacts that have a proven track record for accelerating the professionalization of various disciplines. In order for this to succeed in BPM, it is vital to involve the broader business process community and derive a BoK that has essential characteristics that addresses the discipline’s needs. We argue for the necessity of a comprehensive BoK for the BPM domain, and present a core list of essential features to consider when developing a BoK based on preliminary empirical evidence. The paper identifies and critiques existing Bodies of Knowledge related to BPM, and firmly calls for an effort to develop a more accurate and sustainable BoK for BPM. An approach for this effort is presented with preliminary outcomes.

As business processes, services and relationships, are now recognized as key organizational assets, the demand for the so-called boundary-spanning roles and process-aware professionals is continuing to grow. The world-wide demand for these roles will continue to increase, fueled by the unprecedented interest in Business Process Management (BPM) and the other emerging cross-functional disciplines. This, in turn, creates new opportunities, as well as some unforeseeable challenges for BPM education, both in university and industry. This paper reports on an analysis of the current BPM offerings of Australian universities. It presents a critical review of what is taught and how it is taught, and identifies a series of gaps and concerns. Explanations and recommendations are proposed and a call made for BPM educators worldwide, for urgent action.

With the growing presence of BPM and SOA in the IT industry, their impact on the IT education will be profound. Many institutions are becoming aware of the acute need of developing learning and teaching resource frameworks for the BPM and SOA. In this paper, we present part of such an effort from a team at the University of New South Wales, currently developing Service Learning and Teaching Foundry as a dedicated virtual teaching and learning space for BPM/SOA. We present the motivation, design and current implementation of the foundry, as well as a curriculum design of a Service Technologies module which is used to pilot the foundry system.