Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling

To advance the understanding of factors influencing the quality of business process models, researchers have recently begun to investigate the way how humans create process models—the process of process modeling (PPM). In this idea paper, we subscribe to this human–centered perspective of process modeling and present future research directions pursued in the vision of Modeling Mind. In particular, we envision to extend existing research toward PPM behavior patterns (PBP) that emerge during the creation of process models. Thereby, we explore PBPs by triangulating several quantitative and qualitative research methods, i.e., integrating the modeler’s interaction with the modeling environment, think aloud data, and eye movement data. Having established a set of PBPs, we turn toward investigating factors determining the occurrence of PBPs, taking into account modeler–specific and task–specific factors. These factors manifest as modeling expertise, self–regulation, and working memory capacity. In a next step, we seek to investigate the connection between PBPs and process model quality in terms of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic quality. These findings, in turn, will be used for facilitating the development of customized modeling environments, supporting the process modeler in creating process models of high quality. Through this idea paper, we would like to invite researcher to join our research efforts to ultimately arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the PPM, leading to process models of higher quality.

Process model quality has been an area of considerable research efforts. In this context, correctness-by-construction as enabled by change patterns provides promising perspectives. While the process of process modeling (PPM) based on change primitives has been thoroughly investigated, only little is known about the PPM based on change patterns. In particular, it is unclear what set of change patterns should be provided and how the available change pattern set impacts the PPM. To obtain a better understanding of the latter as well as the (subjective) perceptions of process modelers, the arising challenges, and the pros and cons of different change pattern sets we conduct a controlled experiment. Our results indicate that process modelers face similar challenges irrespective of the used change pattern set (core pattern set versus extended pattern set, which adds two advanced change patterns to the core patterns set). An extended change pattern set, however, is perceived as more difficult to use, yielding a higher mental effort. Moreover, our results indicate that more advanced patterns were only used to a limited extent and frequently applied incorrectly, thus, lowering the potential benefits of an extended pattern set.

A business process can be characterized by multiple perspectives (intentional, organizational, operational, functional, interactional, informational, etc.). Business process modeling must allow different stakeholders to analyze and represent process models according to these different perspectives. This representation is traditionally built using classical data acquisition methods together with a process representation language such as BPMN or UML. These techniques and specialized languages can easily become hard, complex and time consuming. In this paper we propose ISEA, a participative end-user modeling approach that allows the stakeholders in a business process to collaborate together in a simple way to communicate the business process requirements in an accurate and understandable manner. Our approach covers the organizational perspective of business processes, exploits the information compiled during the simulation of the processes in the organizational perspective and touches lightly an interactional perspective allowing users to create customized interface sketches to test the user interface navigability and the coherence within the processes. Thus, ISEA can be seen as a participative end-user modeling approach for business process requirements.

Process-aware information systems must ensure compliance of the business processes they implement with global compliance rules related to security constraints, domain-specific guidelines, standards, and laws. Usually, respective compliance rules cover multiple process perspectives; i.e., they not only deal with the control flow perspective that restricts the sequence in which the process activities shall be executed, but also refer to other process perspectives like data, time, and resource. Although there are various approaches for specifying compliance rules (e.g., based on temporal logic and narrative patterns), only few languages allow for the visual modeling of compliance rules. In turn, existing visual languages focus on the control flow perspective, but treat the other process perspectives as second class citizens. To remedy this drawback, this paper presents an approach for the visual modeling of business process compliance rules, including the resource perspective. The suitability of this approach is evaluated in a case study that was performed by business analysts in the healthcare domain.

Considering the history of the formation of the business process management discipline and its concept definitions, and by looking at organisations as social systems, it can be demonstrated that conventional business process management practices can be associated with the functionalist social paradigm and therefore are only applicable in unitary problem contexts. Participants in unitary problem contexts have similar values, beliefs and interests, share common goals and objectives and are all involved in decision-making about how to achieve the common goals and objectives. It can be argued that this problem context covers only a very small percentage of the problems that an organisation is concerned with and that this inherent paradigmatic limitation in the current definitions of business process management concepts causes the outcomes of the BPM practices based on them to be unrealistic, incomplete and even at points misleading. To address this paradigmatic limitation this paper proposes new definitions for BPM’s main concepts to reduce its tight coupling with the unitary problem context and make it more applicable in pluralist and coercive problem contexts and therefore closer in its outcomes to the reality of the organisation.

Finding human resources with the required set of skills, experience, and availability to execute an activity at a specific moment, is a socio-technical challenge for enterprises that use business-process aware systems. On an intra-organizational level, there exists an increasing body of knowledge for automated human-resource management. However, the recent pervasiveness of service-oriented cloud computing combined with mobile devices and big data, has resulted in the emergence of crossorganizational ecosystems in which workforce is distributed. Consequently, human-resource management has to consider more requirements compared to a purely intra-organizational setting. This position paper addresses the gap and describes a set of challenges in the management of human resources in service outsourcing scenarios based on process views and automatic process-view matching. The contribution is a specification of research directions that must be pursued so that resource management successfully adopts the special requirements for scaling to a cross-organizational level.

Social network technology has been established as a prominent way of communication between members of an organization or enterprise. This paper presents an approach extending the typical social network interaction model to promote participant collaboration through service provision within an organization, towards the Enterprise 2.0 vision. The proposed interaction model between enterprise network participants incorporates their actual roles in the organization and enables the definition of custom relation types implementing custom policies and rules. It supports a complex mechanism for refined content propagation according to participant relations and/or roles. Moreover, the collaboration of participants to provide services and complete specific business tasks through Social Business Process Management is facilitated by enabling the execution of specific activities in each participant profile according to his/her actual role. To explore the potential of the proposed interaction model towards Enterprise 2.0, two prototype social networks, developed to serve different communities and needs, are discussed as case studies.

The paper suggests a framework for achieving alignment between a process and its external and internal environment. The framework consists of two components. The first component concerns alignment between the process and its external environment - business environment in which the process functions or is to function. The second component concerns alignment between the process and its internal environment the most important part of which are people participating in the process. The second component, which is in the focus of the paper, is based on the socio-technical view on information systems. The framework is aimed to move the focus of business process reengineering/ improvement from local optimization through the use of technology to the needs of satisfying business goals, and fostering human capital that is needed to achieve them.

In traditional approaches business processes are executed on top of IT-based Workflow-Management Systems (WfMS). The key benefits of the application of a WfMS are task coordination, step-by-step guidance through process execution and traceability supporting compliance issues. However, when dealing with human-driven workflows, conventional WfMS turn out to be too restrictive. Especially, the only way to handle exceptions is to bypass the system. If users are forced to bypass WfMS frequently, the system is more a liability than an asset. In order to diminish the dependency from IT-based process management systems, we propose an alternative way of supporting workflow execution that is especially suitable for human-driven processes. We introduce the so-called process checklist representation of process models where processes are described as a paper-based step-by-step instruction handbook.

Fabric-processes are processes acting upon a fabric. A fabric is a set of virtualized resources and services supporting business processes. Fabric processes do not directly pursue a business goal, but IT-related goals such as the creation of a cloud-service or its configuration. Fabric-processes differ from business processes in their meta-model. Fabric processes include resources and operations not found in business processes. The meta-model developed enables the proper specification of fabric-processes. We address requirements for specifying fabric-processes by so-called Fabric-Process Patterns. We develop a Fabric-Resource-Meta-Model which implements the Fabric-Process Patterns. The Fabric-Resource-Meta-Model extends existing resource meta-models.

Organizations realize that benefits can be achieved by closely working together on the design of their business processes. But even when there is a joint design for a particular business process, the way individual organizations carry out that process may differ – either wittingly or unwittingly. This paper proposes an analytical approach that helps to compare how different organizations execute essentially the same process. This comparison is based on the alignment of recorded process behavior with explicitly defined process models. The distinctive feature of the proposed approach is that it supports the comparison of the actual execution of a process within a particular organization with its

intended

design, as well as with the

variants

of that design by other organizations. In this way, organizations can develop a better understanding of how they can work together and further standardize a process of common interest. We include an industrial case study from the context of the CoSeLoG project to demonstrate the value of this comparison approach.

In the current economic and technological context, changes of different kinds affecting the organization and its processes are inevitable. They can come from government regulations, the emergence of new competitors, the resources availability, etc. To maintain their efficiency and competitiveness, organizations are constrained to adapt their processes continuously to these changes. Thus business processes have to be efficiently modeled in order to give them their capacity to be adaptable. In addition, the factors whose variations require changes in the processes execution have to be identified and formalized. We introduce in this paper a multi-perspective approach for business process modeling which include five perspectives, i.e. the intentional perspective, the organizational perspective, the functional perspective, the non-functional perspective and the non-organizational resource-perspective. The proposed approach integrates variability - in both organizational and functional perspectives - providing several possible representations of the same process, it also allows to capture change factors related to roles of actors and quality requirements. Furthermore, it allows taking into account change factors related to the context.

Accountability provides the necessary assurance to different stakeholders (customers, auditors, regulators) about the correct execution of the obligations concerning compliance requirements. Modeling accountability in a business process is an important problem, as SOA is the generally accepted standard for IT systems. This requires the orchestration of several non-functional concerns across services (such as authentication, authorization, logging, among others) to attest the correct operation of control activities. In this paper, we show how a model-driven framework for non-functional concerns can integrate accountability in business processes. Using the NFComp modeling framework, we define and compose a set of non-functional concerns that securely assert that subjects have fulfilled their responsibilities, towards realizing accountability. The approach allows the reuse of the composed accountability concerns in different processes.

Modern information systems are large-sized and comprise multiple heterogeneous and autonomous components. Autonomy enables decentralization, but it also implies that components providers are free to change, retire, or introduce new components. This is a threat to security, and calls for a continuous verification process to ensure compliance with security policies. Existing verification frameworks either have limited expressiveness—thereby inhibiting the specification of real-world requirements—, or rely on formal languages that are hardly employable for modeling and verifying large systems. In this paper, we overcome the limitations of existing approaches by proposing a framework that enables: (1) specifying information systems in SecBPMN, a security-oriented extension of BPMN; (2) expressing security policies through SecBPMN-Q, a query language for representing security policies; and (3) verifying SecBPMN-Q against SecBPMN specifications via an implemented query engine. We report on the applicability of our approach via a case study about air traffic management.

Learning humans’ behavior from activity logs requires choosing an adequate machine learning technique regarding the situation at hand. This choice impacts significantly results reliability. In this paper, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are used to build intentional process models (Maps) from activity logs. Since HMMs parameters require to be learned, the main contribution of this paper is to compare supervised and unsupervised learning approaches of HMMs. After a theoretical comparison of both approaches, they are applied on two controlled experiments to compare the Maps thereby obtained. The results demonstrate using supervised learning leads to a poor performance because it imposes binding conditions in terms of data labeling, introduces inherent humans’ biases, provides unreliable results in the absence of ground truth, etc. Instead, unsupervised learning obtains efficient Maps with a higher performance and lower humans’ effort.

This paper takes a cross-disciplinary view of the ontology of “business process”: how the concept is treated in the IS research literature and how related concepts (with stronger human behavioural orientation) from organisational and management sciences can potentially inform this IS perspective. In particular, is there room for socio-technical concepts such as technology affordance, derived from the constructivist tradition, in improving our understanding of operational business processes?

The paper draws on the current research being pursued by the authors in developing a theoretical framework for understanding the role of IT in organisational agility. In this developing theoretical model, we are seeking to include the user-oriented socio-technical dimension that distinguishes the IT “as-used” from the IT “as-designed” in our use of business process as an organisational building block.

An efficient business process redesign is an ambitious research and implementation challenge for both academia and industry. Traditional approaches for business process improvement are based on activity flows, not considering data of business processes. In this paper, we provide an approach to business process improvement, which is based on data and on combining data with decision theory. In particular, subprocesses are formalized as decision activities and analyzed according to techniques from decision theory. We demonstrate the applicability of our research with a use case, where meetings in an enterprise are scheduled.

Process models are an important element of business process management. Modelling and management of these models can be supported by business process patterns. In recent years, various approaches for defining such patterns were introduced. The aim of this paper is to promote the precise classification of these approaches by presenting a catalogue consisting of several criteria developed by means of a systematic literature review. A first evaluation of this catalogue is conducted by classifying ten pattern approaches.

While the increasing interest in BPM by private and public organizations confirm the relevance of process-centric philosophy, it also increases the expectations and uncertainties on how to introduce and evolve a BPM initiative. This paper investigates how BPM practices are adopted by Brazilian public organizations. We conducted case studies with two Brazilian public organizations to investigate how the interaction of barriers and facilitators influence the evolution of their BPM initiatives. A System Dynamics approach is proposed as a diagnosis tool to analyze the current performance of BPM initiatives. Systemic archetypes were created to represent specific combinations of virtuous reinforcement and balancing cycles among barriers and facilitators. We identified that support from top management and lack of team skills and competencies in BPM are key factors influencing the evolution of BPM initiatives. The implications for practice lies in the fact that systemic archetypes are generic structures repeatable in different contexts. Due to their predictable behavior, the recognition of archetypes can inspire effective action strategies to handle problematic situations that may occur in BPM initiatives facing similar situations.

The Fractal Process-Asset (FPA) model has been proposed as an approach for identifying business processes and defining relationships between them in an enterprise. This paper reports on a project of applying the model in a Higher Education Institution enterprise. The goal of this project is twofold. One is to design a process architecture that provides a holistic view on the major business processes and their interconnections in the department to be used for business planning and development. Second is to test whether the FPA model is suitable for creating a holistic view on the major business processes and their interconnections in an enterprise. The FPA model has been applied and evaluated by business domain experts in a frame of a real organization—department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University. The results show that the FPA model is understandable and suitable for creating a holistic view on the major business processes in an enterprise and their interconnections. The educational processes architecture produced is understandable and can be used for business planning and development. Though the study has been conducted only in one organization, there is a likelihood that the results achieved are of general nature.

In order to increase the accuracy of conceptual models, graphical languages such as UML are often enriched with textual constraint languages such as the Object Constraint Language (OCL). This enables modelers to benefit from the simplicity of diagrammatic languages while retaining the expressiveness required for producing accurate models. In this paper, we discuss how OCL is used to enrich a conceptual model assessment tool based on an ontologically well-founded profile of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) that assumes multiple and dynamic classification (called OntoUML). In the approach, OCL expressions are transformed into Alloy statements enabling model validation and assertion verification with the Alloy Analyzer. The tool we have developed allows modelers with no Alloy expertise to express constraints in OCL enriching OntoUML models.

We investigate the category structure of categories common to conceptual modeling languages (i.e., the types used by languages such as actor, process, goal, or restriction) to study whether they more closely approximate a discrete or graded category. We do this for three distinct groups: students, beginning modelers and experienced modelers. We find that overall most categories exhibit more of a graded structure, with experienced modelers displaying this even more strongly than the other groups. We discuss the consequences of these results for (conceptual) modeling in general, and in particular argue that when a model contains graded categories, it should follow that the (conceptual) validity of instantiations of it should be judged in a graded fashion as well.

Modelling and management of the security risks from the early stages of information systems development could help to envision early security threats, their consequences and potential countermeasures. However, the security modelling languages could bring benefit only if they are correctly applied and the stakeholders comprehend models and agree about their meaning. In this paper we analyse how humans comprehend the security risk-oriented/aware modelling (SRM) languages and models. Specifically, by applying the semiotic quality framework, we investigate (

i

) concepts of the security risk management, and (

ii

) participant and modeller appropriateness regarding the SRM languages. Our results indicate the best and worst perceived SRM constructs and highlight few challenges to improve the SRM languages.

A considerable number of methods and tools have been proposed for the treatment of non-functional requirements (NFRs). There is ample evidence that NFRs play a significant role in the Information Systems Engineering process. However, there is surprisingly an absence of an agreed position regarding the definition of NFRs, their classification and presentation. This paper reports on a systematic literature review of the documented NFR approaches, classifies these approaches according to different criteria and provides a qualitative analysis of their scopes and characteristics. The results of this analysis can serve system developers as the means of deriving appropriate methods and tools of NFRs engineering process in the system development.

Nowadays, variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from organizational or informational perspectives of process models. This paper introduces an approach to generate context-sensitive process model variants that come from adaptations in the organizational perspective. The approach is inspired by real life scenarios and has its conceptualization based on general concepts such as abstraction, and polymorphism.

Recently the interest in managing families of business processes rather than individual processes has increased, mainly due to the need to maintain different variants of the same business process or similar business processes in the same organization. This led to the extension of different business process modeling languages (BPMLs) in order to support the representation of design-time variability, namely variability that is resolved when designing the particular business processes (the variants). However, the evaluation of these languages expressiveness is still in an inceptive stage. In particular, the abilities to express variable elements in different granularity levels and to guide variability in business process models have not been examined. To tackle this lack, we propose a two-dimensional framework which explicitly refers to granularity and guidance. We further examine how existing extensions of BPMLs support these dimensions, point on deficiencies in their expressiveness, and discuss the implications of those deficiencies through examples from a case study.

Goal models are used for the elicitation and specification of strategic requirements in early phases of the software engineering lifecycle. By explicitly modeling requirements on a strategic level, these goals provide input for the derivation of operational software specifications. An unambiguous and consistent definition of the goals is the prerequisite for this derivation. Addressing this challenge, this paper presents an analytic approach for the automatic detection of linguistic inconsistencies in goal models. By providing syntactical and semantic consistency conditions, we support requirements engineers by improving the overall quality of goal-oriented requirements specifications. To demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we apply it to three case studies taken from literature using the implemented tool support.

This case study paper presents DEMO models of a very complex process of urban construction licensing from a city hall. From our practical experience in this project, we elicit some guidelines and process patterns that may be useful to other similar projects and also guide DEMO modelers in similar scenarios of process complexity. From the metrics we got from this case study, we provide an empirical validation of DEMO’s qualities of comprehensiveness and conciseness. Thanks to the nature of the transaction axiom, we managed to uncover hidden or neglected important process steps, not captured in the results of models previously obtained by the use of a flowchart approach.

An important topic in the modeling for IS development concerns quality of obtained models, especially when these models are to be used in global scopes, or as references. So far, a number of model quality frameworks have been established to assess relevant criteria such as completeness, clarity, modularity, or generality. In this study we take a look at how a research process contributes to the characteristics of a model produced during that process. For example: what should be observed; what research methods should be selected and how should they be applied; what kind of results should be expected; how they should be evaluated, etc. We report a result on this concern by presenting how we applied

Design Science Research

to model business strategy.

Around the world, Enterprise Architecture (EA) practices are been formed in large and medium companies that see in IT either a competitive advantage or a requirement for survival. These EA practices produce models that conceptualize the enterprise, and are commonly used only for communication purposes. Using these models also for analysis purposes is desirable, but this is hard to do because of the complexity and size of these models. Automated analysis tools seem to be adequate mechanisms to solve this issue, but currently there is a problem of mismatch between the information available in the models, and the information that the automated mechanisms require. To address this, this paper proposes a characterization of analysis functions, which makes explicit the information that each one requires to be executable (among other things). Furthermore, the paper presents

ArchiAnalysis,

an extensible tool for applying analysis functions over ArchiMate models.

The “software crisis” is still a prevailing problem to many organizations despite existence of advanced systems engineering methods, techniques for project planning and method engineering; systems engineering project still struggle to deliver on time and budget, and with sufficient quality. Existing research stresses that time leakage has a lever effect on economic outcome, which is not addressed in the abovementioned approaches. As part of an on-going research project we therefore extend existing method engineering concept to include time distortion analysis. This allows for analysis of resource use (productivity) in execution of method components. It has the potential to act as a) a tool for improving the execution of systems engineering processes, or b) criteria for selecting method parts to improve the systems engineering processes.

E3value is a well-known technique for modeling value networks that abstracts from processes and platform specifics. Although there exist some methodological guidelines for value modeling, no formal properties have been defined so far that could distinguish “good” from “bad” value models. This is sometimes felt as a gap, both in practice and in teaching. In this paper, some basic formal properties are introduced, based on the notion of value cycle.

Whilst there are successful general web search engines such as Google that will find any piece of content, there is a perceived need for a specific search that makes better use of the internal knowledge the broadcasting industry (e.g. BBC) has about its own content. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a public service broadcaster funded by the licence fee paid by United Kingdom households. This industry-based case study looks at the applicability of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and Unified Modelling Language (UML) to design a hypothetical, high-level view of a search application that receives web content from a variety of BBC content production systems and makes every item then searchable by a BBC website visitor using the search feature. The developers of such search applications can benefit from this specific industry-based case study that contextualised the problem space using SSM and developed UML models to solve the problem.