Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling

E-government has become one of the most prominent means to reform the public sector. Building e-government embraces a variety of efforts both at a centralised level, (e.g. the integration of and communication between systems across different agencies, domains and geographies), and at local levels such as the development of e-services for the provision of 24/7 public sector agencies. In this paper, we report on the results of a project aimed to develop e-services as a part of the e-government initiative in Sweden. The project was carried out at the elderly and handicapped unit at one municipality. The e-services considered in the project were also intended to open up the underlying social services and are, therefore, referred to as open e-services. We discuss the results of the development of one such e-service as a proof-of concept solution for which a business process management system is used. We present the solution and explain the features of using a business process management system as a back-end system.

Kurt Lewin’s statement “There is nothing more practical than a good theory” says not so much about what is good for practice, but rather what it means to have a good theory. There exist a number of competing theories in the business process domain. The current paper is devoted to one of those that lie outside the mainstream direction. The purpose of the paper is not to present the theory as such, but to present the stages of how it was developed with the aim of becoming a “good” theory from the practical point of view. The paper is written as an experience report and goes through different stages of the development where research efforts where intermixed with practical tests. The theory in question is the state-oriented view on business processes. The basic idea of this theory lies in application of the general principles of the theory of dynamic systems to the business domain. The main direction for practical application of theoretical results is the development of IT-support for loosely structured business processes. Besides giving the history of the related research and practical efforts, the paper discusses the lessons learned that can be of interest for the development of other theoretical models/views in the business process domain.

In this paper we report on our experiences of applying business process mining in a real business context. The context for the application is using process mining for the purpose of internal auditing of a procurement cycle in a large multinational financial institution. One of the targeted outcomes of an internal audit is often the reporting on internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR), since this reporting is mandatory for Sarbanes-Oxley regulated organisations. Our process mining analyses resulted in more identified issues concerning ICFR than the traditional auditing approach. Issues that were identified using process mining analysis concerned violations of the segregation of duties principle, payments without approval, and violations of company specific internal procedures.

Business Process Management is a widely known approach focused on aligning processes of an organization in order to achieve improved efficiency and client satisfaction. Governance is an important requirement to enable successful BPM initiatives. This paper provides a qualitative empirical study to investigate what BPM governance elements are adopted by teams conducting early BPM initiatives in public organizations. The results suggest that early BPM adopters in public sector face several barriers due to difficulties in acquiring professionals with BPM expertise, bureaucracy and legislation rigidity, among others. In particular, committed sponsorship and monitoring were appointed as important BPM governance facilitators by participants of the study. Findings also show that further empirical studies are needed to increase the body of evidence in this field.

Reducing the Cost of a Business Process is a challenge faced by organizations. Business Process researchers have recommended a host of best practices for Business Process design which leads to Cost effectiveness. However, these are theoretical and there is no real guideline for either implementation or the Cost reduction acheived by the implementation of these best practices. In this paper, we evaluate the most commonly recommended best practices available in literature for Cost reduction for their effectiveness. We implement a pattern based Cost calculation methodology which shows the impact of best practices on examples in a measurable way. Using this methodology we calculate the overall Cost, reliability and the Cost incurred to achieve one successful execution of the Business Process; the Business Cost of the process.

The importance of process improvement and the role that best practice reference models play in the achievement of process improvement are both well recognized. Best practice reference models are generally created by experts in the domain who are external to the organization. However, best practice can also be implicitly derived from the work practices of actual workers within the organisation, especially when there is opportunity for variance within the work, i.e. there may be different approaches to achieve the same process goal. In this paper, we propose to support process improvement intrinsically by utilizing the experiences and knowledge of business process users to inform and improve the current practices. The main challenge in this regard is identifying the “best” previous practices, which are often based on multiple criteria. To this end, we propose a method based on the skyline operator, which is applied on criteria relevant data derived from business process execution logs. We will demonstrate that the proposed method is capable to generate meaningful recommendations from large data sets in an efficient way, thereby effectively facilitating organizational learning and inherent process improvement.

The success of most of today’s businesses is tied to the efficiency and effectiveness of their core processes. This importance has been recognized in research, leading to a wealth of sophisticated process optimization and analysis techniques. Their use in practice is, however, often limited as both the selection and the application of the appropriate techniques are challenging tasks. Hence, many techniques are not considered causing potentially significant opportunities of improvement not to be implemented. This paper proposes an approach to addressing this challenge using our deep Business Optimization Platform. By integrating a catalogue of formalized optimization techniques with data analysis and integration capabilities, it assists analysts both with the selection and the application of the most fitting optimization techniques for their specific situation. The paper presents both the concepts underlying this platform as well as its prototypical implementation.

Automated support of business processes by information systems can be seen as state-of-the-art for many domains, such as production planning or customer relationship management. A myriad of approaches to the automation of business processes in these domains has been proposed. However, these approaches are not suited for highly creative processes, as they are observed in the field of innovative product design. These processes require a high degree of flexibility of the process implementation. In this paper, we focus on product design processes and propose a methodology for the implementation of supporting workflows. In order to cope with the imposed flexibility requirements, we follow an artifact-centric approach. Based on high-level process models, object life-cycle models are derived. Those are manually enriched and used for automatic generation of an executable workflow model. We also present an implementation of our approach.

Process Management Systems (PMSs, aka Workflow Management Systems – WfMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool to coordinate the enactment of processes. In real world scenarios, the environment may change in unexpected ways so as to prevent a process from being successfully carried out. In order to cope with these anomalous situations, a PMS should automatically adapt the process without completely replacing it. In this paper, we propose a technique, based on continuous planning, to automatically cope with unexpected changes, in order to modify only those parts of the process that need to be changed/adapted and keeping other parts stable. We also provide a running example that shows the practical applicability of the approach.

Processes modeling and execution (with a process engine) are getting more and more incorporated in todays business environments. This movement puts a lot of stress on classical process engines which have to coordinate many process instances simultaneously. Performance degrades quickly as the number of process instances increases, and a single point of failure is introduced by using a central process execution engine. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing a non-intrusive approach to distribute a process flow and have the flow executed by multiple, smaller process engines. We pay special attention to flexibility of the eventual distributed execution, since process change is costly in a distributed environment. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by providing an implementation of the transformation and execution architecture, and demonstrate the lower cost of process change that is achieved when using a flexible process runtime architecture.

Declarative process models support process flexibility, which has been widely recognized as important, particularly for organizations that face frequent changes and variable stimuli from their environment. However, current declarative approaches emphasize activities and provide constraints addressing their existence and dependencies. This expressiveness is not capable of addressing the process context (namely, environment effects) and its goal. The paper proposes a declarative model which addresses activities as well as states, external events, and goals. As such, it explicitly addresses the context of a process. The model is based on the Generic Process Model (GPM), extended by a notion of activity, which includes a state change aspect and an intentional aspect. The achievement of the intention of an activity may depend on events in the environment and is hence not certain. The paper provides a formalization of the model and some conditions for verification. These are illustrated by an example from the medical domain.

Declarative approaches to process modeling are regarded well suited for highly volatile environments as they provide a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding and maintaining declarative process models impede their usage. To compensate for these shortcomings Test Driven Modeling has been proposed. This paper reports from a controlled experiment evaluating the impact of Test Driven Modeling, in particular the adoption of testcases, on process model maintenance. Thereby, students modified declarative process models, one model with the support of testcases and one model without the support of testcases. Data gathered in this experiment shows that the adoption of testcases significantly lowers cognitive load and increases perceived quality of changes. In addition, modelers who had testcases at hand performed significantly more change operations, while at the same time the quality of process models did not decrease.

While the use of a single business process paradigm (e.g. procedural or declarative) over the process lifecycle is often assumed in business process management, transitions between approaches at different phases in the lifecycle could also be examined. This paper explores several business process management strategies by analyzing the approaches at different phases in the process lifecycle as well as the various transitions between those phases.

In this paper, an approach to use task trees in a workflow management system (WfMS) is presented. As hierarchical models task trees capture several hierarchy levels of a workflow in one model. A workflow editor visualizes the models also as flowcharts similar to UML activity diagrams. The WfMS use these models as input and instantiates and executes them. The system is web-based and can be easily accessed by users with any browser clients. This paper motivates the approach to use task trees that produce hierarchical and structured workflow specifications. The proposed language might help end-users to better understand workflow models with its problem oriented hierarchical modeling character. Temporal operators from the task models are compared with certain operators from established workflow languages. In addition, in TTMS an instantiation time concept is implemented, where decision operators are evaluated at the very moment the process is instantiated. Consequently the task tree modeling language is enhanced for modeling decisions in the context of workflow management.

Despite the widespread adoption of BPM, there exist many business processes not adequately supported by existing BPM technology. In previous work we reported on the properties of these processes. As a major insight we learned that, in accordance to the data model comprising object types and object relations, the modeling and execution of processes can be based on two levels of granularity: object behavior and object interactions. This paper focuses on micro processes capturing object behavior and constituting a fundamental pillar of our framework for object-aware process management. Our approach applies the well established concept of modeling object behavior in terms of states and state transitions. Opposed to existing work, we establish a mapping between attribute values and objects states to ensure compliance between them. Finally, we provide a well-defined operational semantics enabling the automatic and dynamic generation of most end-user components at run-time (e.g., overview tables and user forms).

Enterprises that succeed in today’s highly dynamic business environment often enjoy Sustained Competitive Advantage (SCA) as defined by Barney. While recent strategy literature focuses on exploring various sources of SCA, in this paper, we present an operational method for realizing SCA through Business Entity analysis. Business entity-centric modeling has been a successful approach in rethinking and revolutionizing business operations, in a number of engagements. Our method provides a path from SCA-generating strategies to Business Operations and Business Entities. The resulting Business Operations can be prototyped and analyzed to validate SCA properties. Our approach leverages key constructs from OMG’s Business Motivation Model (BMM) and emphasizes the analysis of Influencers – factors that have the capability to impact an enterprise’s strategies that generate SCA. Further, these strategies are used to formulate Business Operations that can be defined by Business Entities. IT applications can be generated from the Business Entities using Model-Driven Architecture. Therefore, these discovered Business Entities actually provide a valid scope for innovating Business Operations and developing IT applications that result in SCA for the business.

A rapidly changing environment, in terms of technology and market, forces companies to keep their business processes aligned with current and upcoming requirements. This is still a major issue in modern process oriented information systems, where improvements on process models require considerable effort to implement them in a technical infrastructure.

We address this problem by lifting technical details into BPMN 2.0 process models and present a configuration wizard for these process models in the open-source modeling tool Oryx. This wizard includes a consistency checking mechanism to automatically discover inconsistencies in the data dependencies of a process model. Immediate feedback after changes to the model eliminates a crucial source of errors when configuring or redesigning business process models, leading to more efficient process implementation.

Enterprise information systems can be developed following a model-driven paradigm. This way, models that represent the organisational work practice are used to produce models that represent the information system. Current software development methods are starting to provide guidelines for the construction of conceptual models, taking as input requirements models. This paper proposes the integration of two methods: Communication Analysis (a communication-oriented requirements engineering method [1]) and the OO Method (a model-driven object-oriented software development method [2]). For this purpose, a systematic technique for deriving class diagrams from business process models is proposed. The business process specifications (which include message structures) are processed in order to obtain class diagram views, which are integrated to create the class diagram incrementally. Then, using the

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framework, software source code can be generated automatically. The paper also discusses the advantages and current limitations of the technique. Results show that, although there is room for improvement, the technique is feasible and it does facilitate the creation of the class diagram.

Web services are increasingly becoming a major part of our daily lives. Many web services composition languages have been developed to describe the way a group of distributed web services interact with each other. In this matter, BPEL is one of the highly used composition languages. In this work, we are interested in verifying BPEL processes. Several works have addressed this issue before, but to our knowledge, a formalism that captures both the behavioral and the timing aspects of all the constructs of BPEL 2.0 does not exist. In this paper, we introduce a verification framework for timed BPEL models. We show how the relative and the absolute time of BPEL can be treated. We also give examples of temporal and timed properties that are supported in our framework. The verification is based on a transformation of all the BPEL constructs to the process algebra language, FIACRE.

In a globalized and networked society, interoperability is a pervasive topic as it is a key factor of success for enterprises to meet their own added values and to exploit the market opportunities. This paper aims at presenting a model based on enterprise interoperability potential following the maturity models approach. Interoperability potential assessment requires a framework to capture the artifacts needed for enterprise interoperations. The framework of Enterprise Interoperability (FEI), currently under CEN/ISO standardization process is used as basis for the defined model.

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) benefit from business processes (BP), which orchestrate web services (WS) and human actors in cross organizational environments. In this setting, handling the security and privacy issues while exchanging and processing personal data is essential. This lacks for secure business processes management. To achieve this, we represent security constraints descriptively by annotating process models, aiming to enforce these constraints by a secure business process management system (BPMS).To assist the process modeler in annotating process models, we introduce in this paper a tool which provides semantic interoperability during process design. By enforcing a shared conceptualization (ontology) of the security and privacy domains with an ontology base grounded in natural language this tool called knowledge annotator is able to make annotation recommendations according to knowledge stored in a knowledge base. The annotator is validated in an employability use case scenario.

Mobile devices are increasingly being used for electronic data collection in low resource setting, where Internet-based solutions are infeasible. The data collection effort often requires the underlying processes, represented as data flows and workflows to be adhered. Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) could enable Mobile Data Collection (MDC) with workflow support as it is in Process Aware Information Systems. However, the use of WFMS for MDC designed for low resource settings needs to address challenges of mobile computing such as disconnections, slow connection links, limited computing power, etc. We present a framework that has been developed to integrate generic Data Collection tools with Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) to enable MDC in such resource-constrained environments. Furthermore we implement a tool based on this framework and provide an example of a vaccination registry project that uses mobile phones to record and track child immunisations.