S-BPM ONE - Education and Industrial Developments

During the second half of 2011 we conducted a survey into the quality and state of the art of business process management. The survey results – based on face to face interviews as well as responses to an online questionnaire from 150 companies – provide a good indication of the challenges companies are facing when designing, implementing and operating processes. In this paper we present an overview of the main results and provide some discussion of their implications.

This paper discusses and proposes a few standard conventions or best practices in subject-oriented business process modeling with the Parallel Activity Specification Schema (PASS). It is derived from experiences gained at Metasonic as well as teaching experience for several seminar projects at an university. The ideas and concepts were derived as solutions for several minor or mayor problems or issues connected to the creation and handling processes of PASS-graphs. They are presented as a basis for discussion on the topic of practicability and usefulness of certain standards or paradigms. The ideas of this paper have been taught to students and applied in several successful S-BPM projects.

Business Process Management is becoming more and more important for the public sector. There are several initiatives to establish solid and secure communication between Government and citizen (G2C), business (G2B) or another Government (G2G). We describe the implementation of a process for the Bavarian Ministry for Social Affairs (StMAS). A dialogue between Government and institutes has to be designed and implemented. The process should be created with S-BPM.

We show the results and discuss the advantage of S-BPM in context of the complex organisation of a federal Government organisation. This shows that S-BPM may be a useful concept for E-Government.

The requirements placed on logistics increased in recent years due to highly dynamic and competitive markets. A high degree of flexibility with regard to the processes needed in order to fulfill customer needs and to stay competitive is paramount. Consequently the knowledge of one’s processes and realistically achievable potential is vital in order to meet the challenges of the market. Whereas flow chart oriented methods allegorize conventional methods for modeling the actual processes, the subject-oriented business process management can be seen as a high potential alternative. Distribution logistics in particular offers many options and permeations to design optimal transport processes; from the choice of the distribution structure to miscellaneous inventory and transport concepts. In the course of optimization the logistical costs should be reduced but, simultaneously not fall below a defined service level.

The focus of the publication is to present an integrated procedure model, optimizing the processes for industrial distribution centers by minimizing the transport costs and striving for0 continuous improvement.

S-BPM promoters claim a stakeholder perspective for modeling processes and organizational development. By moving actors or active system components to the center of interest, functions and business objects are specified in the context of subjects and their behavior. Although the correspondence to natural language sentence semantics is evident, stakeholders in their routine tasks need to be trained to express their business processes in a subject-oriented way, in particular taking into account task-relevant communication with other stakeholders. Moreover, function-oriented developers need learning support, as S-BPM represents a novel BPM paradigm. Findings from language learning facilitate not only structuring information according to standard sentence semantics, but also designing learning environments through principled S-BPM learning support.

This paper describes a project realized by university students at a university administration. It shows which results are achievable through subject-oriented business process modeling by (in this subject area) unexperienced students. The explored process is the enrollment process which, was intransparent to the applicants and not well documented, although it is a central process and represents the first contact of students with university. After process exploration a subject-oriented model of the enrollment process portal was developed as a reference model for the implementation of this portal.

BPMN 2.0 is well on the way to becoming an international process modeling standard and will soon become the modeling method used for many process execution engines such as BPEL. Since it also provides the possibility to model distributed systems, a major concept of S-BPM, its usage is a natural step toward analyzing S-BPM and BPMN mapping possibilities. As will be demonstrated here, conformance to the BPMN 2.0 semantics as a sub class of modeling conformance can be achieved almost completely by the mapping method proposed by this paper. Those conformance deviations and losses that do occur on both sides are due solely to methodological differences discussed at the end of the paper or to be the issue of future work. The achievement of common execution conformance will not be discussed in detail here. The execution of BPMN models requires far more information than what is currently contained in most user models, as recent research has shown.

Teamwork, collaboration and coordination are key aspects of the patient-centric approach taken by modern healthcare. Although many projects have been and are currently being undertaken to improve support for health care professionals, adequate support for teamwork, communication and coordination has yet to be achieved. The delivery of the healthcare service is very challenging as it involves heterogeneous distributed systems, multi-professionals and dependent tasks among each. In addition, the treatment journey of each patient is unique as a decision is usually made according to several constraints related to the patient, medical condition, patient’s choice, available resources and/or doctor’s consultation decision. We believe that, in order to provide the required support, it is necessary to explicitly acknowledge the patient’ s medical state within their treatment journey. This project proposes the use of a Business Process Management (BPM) system that uses associations between patients, health care professionals, and the Integrated Care Pathway (ICP) to provide improved support for healthcare professionals as individuals and members of integrated care teams. Moreover, mapping the ICP into the BPM system will help support the implementation of best practice according to the national guidelines. By leveraging the information contained in these associations, and understanding the patient progress along the dynamic care pathway, this proposal provides tailored context-based actions. This includes automated notifications, alerts, scheduling and timers, as well as supporting treatment continuity and tracking as the patient progresses through their treatment journey. Clinicians’ and developers’ feedback on this proposal has been very positive.

Until 2011, S-BPM has been lacking the possibility to model special issues like reacting to events at any time. This paper gives an overview over two new modeling constructs (“message guard” & “macro”) proposed by Fleischmann et al. It further connects these constructs to the well-known workflow patterns and offers the first (technical) implementation of the behavior extensions within an S-BPM modeling- and workflow-tool. At the end, two examples for real-world processes making use of the new extension are given.

Recently there have been some discussion about possible revolutions in business process management. It is evident, that business process management up to now misses a solid scientific foundation. This has led to misinterpretations during implementation of business process management in organizations on one side, and uncoordinated research directions and results on the other side. It can be shown, that actual concepts, such as BPMN 2.0 or scientific community driven concepts such as Petri-nets do not fit business and organizational needs. We discuss one possible step forward to come up with a solid scientific definition of business process management, id est process calculi such as CCS and π-calculus. Based on these algebras, we can define and study business processes on a formal basis. Further on, we demonstrate that such calculi are not only theoretical concepts, but can be used for daily business process modeling and enactment in the from of the subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM) methodology.

In many real-world business process management (BPM) installments, the benefit of BPM is diminished by an insufficient implementation of the to-be business processes. One of the key reasons for this problem is the complexity of classical process modeling representations that exceed the BPM knowledge of many target groups.

This contribution introduces the ProcessWiki method, which adapts the BPM 2.0 and adaptive case management (ACM) approaches. The ProcessWiki method has two primary objectives: (1) Providing a method that allows communicating business process models in a way that is easily understood by employees with little or no BPM knowledge and (2) enabling these employees to improve “their” business processes by using collaborative tools. The method was developed during a joint project with the BMW Group and is illustrated using a corresponding software solution.

Organizational agility (OA) has emerged as a mission critical success factor in order to cope with the fast changing economic environment. Companies are forced to anticipate future developments and react to threats and opportunities in a timely manner. This concept has primarily managerial aspects, though science has evinced that information technology and systems are facilitators of OA. Moreover, Gartner Research Group identifies the business process management systems (BPMS) industry as one of fastest developing and growing markets for the near future. This raises one particular question, addressing the link between BPMS and a sort of OA, namely business process agility (BPA). Consequently, this contribution provides a theoretical base for the examination of BPMS regarding BPA, reviewing the scientific literature on OA and BPA, confronting it with the business process management lifecycle and finally deriving requirements for BPMS facilitating BPA.

Circumstances in our society and economy are far more complex and interconnected today than they were years ago. But still we focus on a very traditional way of working on tasks: a linear and mechanistic way of thinking and acting. Ignoring that modern, complex and highly developed systems need a different way of dealing with organisations, tasks and processes, we wonder more and more why goals can be achieved less and less. Leaving the mechanistic point of view and introducing an organic approach, smart4sense2act (read: smart-for-sense-to-act) offers a computer-supported approach and procedure (including a set of methods) ready to use for displaying, analysing and working on complex tasks and processes. Be it strategic planning, organisational development, process- or project-mangement, smart4sense2act offers one set of methods and one web-based tool for different tasks. smart4sense2act is barrier-free as well as quick and easy to use. Based on subject-oriented process-management, the principle of smart4sense2act is a stakeholder oriented systemic analysing and arranging of tasks. Aiming on the quick and direct implementation of results within the organisation, the goal of smart4sense2act is to support organisations in gaining a more realistic and value-oriented performance facing the actual needs of today and tomorrow.

Security and privacy in computer systems is a major issue and it is hard to find a good compromise between necessary protection and desirable open access to the internet. We propose a subject-oriented approach to computer security analysis in order to comply with the users’ needs.

We introduce a subject-driven approach to integrated process, task, and information management for knowledge workers. This approach is realized in the Task and Personal Information Rendering (TAPIR) extension of the Semantic Mediawiki that we present in this paper. The focus is placed on eliciting subjective process information from daily task management. The approach starts from the insight that individuals’ motivation to provide relevant process information can be increased if they directly benefit from their contributions. TAPIR uses process relevant information to support users in their task management. Hereby it fosters S-BPM by gathering subjective process information that can be used for organizational purposes.

Business process orientation (BPO) is a concept where the firm’s organizational design focuses on business processes ranging from customer to customer rather than on the functional structure. Various authors and studies refer to a positive impact of BPO on firm performance, building the study’s underlying research hypothesis. Although literature in this field is growing, certain gaps still remain. The Master’s Thesis contributes to a greater clarity and better understanding of how BPO influences firm performance in two ways. First, the study respects the multidimensional nature of BPO. The firm’s exhibited BPO degree is measured along the dimensions process knowledge/documentation, continuous process improvement, corporate culture, process owner, management commitment, and process performance measurement. Second, the investigation is performed as a function of industry type in order to identify differences between manufacturing and service companies. For this purpose, Austrian manufacturing and service firms with at least 50 employees were examined on the basis of an online survey. Marketing data served as primary data basis. A pilot test was conducted at the beginning of May 2011 including 500 randomly drawn firms. Due to the rather low response rates, it was decided to directly contact key informants like managing directors or heads of quality management. Data collection finished in the first week of August 2011 with 898 (18.79%) completed questionnaires. As dependent and independent data rely on single-source ratings and therefore potentially suffer from common method bias, a follow-up survey was conducted in October 2011 focusing on the outcome variables financial performance, customer satisfaction, and innovation. This led to a final sample size of 483. After assessing the construct’s unidimensionality, reliability and validity, hierarchical regression analyses were performed. The findings indicate that the culture in line with the process approach is a positive driver of financial performance and customer satisfaction. Furthermore continuous process improvement, the process owner role and management commitment are positively related with certain types of innovation. However, also a negative effect of process knowledge and documentation was discovered. Especially service innovation processes are rather unformalized and unstructured which is grounded in the service nature. Since customers and their needs are directly involved in these processes requireing larger amounts of communication, subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM) could help making these processes more systematic in order to enhance performance.

The different stakeholders in Business Process Management have to deal with various process models in order to understand the business processes being relevant for them. Especially inexperienced stakeholders often have difficulties in comprehending large and complex process models. In this paper a stakeholder-centered approach for modeling, changing and visualizing business processes is introduced. It is based on the Concurrent Task Tree (CTT), which constitutes a task modeling language widely applied in the field of end-user development. In particular, CTT considers stakeholder needs in modeling the behaviour of user interfaces. In the context of our work we apply CTT for modeling, changing and visualizing business processes. To evaluate whether CTT is appropriate for stakeholder-centered process modeling we compare it with imperative process modeling, and introduce a mapping between CTT process models and imperative process models expressed in terms of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Finally, we provide an advanced stakeholder-centered visualization concept based on CTT.