Handbook on Business Process Management 1

Googling the term “Business Process Management” in May 2008 yields some 6.4 million hits, the great majority of which (based on sampling) seem to concern the so-called BPM software systems. This is ironic and unfortunate, because in fact IT in general, and such BPM systems in particular, is at most a peripheral aspect of Business Process Management. In fact, Business Process Management (BPM) is a comprehensive system for managing and transforming organizational operations, based on what is arguably the first set of new ideas about organizational performance since the Industrial Revolution.

In this chapter, the topic of using process improvement approaches to improve knowledge work is addressed. The effective performance of knowledge work is critical to contemporary sophisticated economies. It is suggested that traditional, engineering-based approaches to knowledge work are incompatible with the autonomy and work approaches of many knowledge workers. Therefore, a variety of alternative process-oriented approaches to knowledge work are described. Emphasis is placed on differentiating among different types of knowledge work and applying process interventions that are more behaviorally sensitive.

Business Process Management or BPM, broadly speaking, is part of a tradition that is now several decades old that aims at improving the way business people think about and manage their businesses. Its particular manifestations, whether they are termed “Work Simplification,” “Six Sigma,” “Business Process Reengineering,” or “Business Process Management,” may come and go, but the underlying impulse, to shift the way managers and employees think about the organization of business, will continue to grow and prosper. This chapter will provide a very broad survey of the business process movement. Anyone who tries to promote business process change in an actual organization will soon realize that there are many different business process traditions and that individuals from the different traditions propose different approaches to business process change. If we are to move beyond a narrow focus on one tradition or technology, we need a comprehensive understanding of where we have been and where we are today, and we need a vision of how we might move forward. We will begin with a brief overview of the past and of the three business process traditions that have created the context for today’s interest in BPM. Then we will turn to a brief survey of some of the major concerns that process practitioners are focused on today and that will probably impact most corporate BPM efforts in the near future.

This chapter describes a framework for modeling the business architecture layer of enterprise architecture. We subscribe to the definition of enterprise architecture provided by Ken Orr, who identifies business architecture as the top layer of four linked architectures in an enterprise architecture. This chapter describes a value creation architecture consisting of the business architecture, the management system architecture, the technology performance architecture, and the human performance architecture.

The previous chapters gave an insightful introduction into the various facets of Business Process Management. We now share a rich understanding of the essential ideas behind designing and managing processes for organizational purposes. We have also learned about the various streams of research and development that have influenced contemporary BPM. As a matter of fact, BPM has become a holistic management discipline. As such, it requires that a plethora of facets needs to be addressed for its successful und sustainable application. This chapter provides a framework that consolidates and structures the essential factors that constitute BPM as a whole. Drawing from research in the field of maturity models, we suggest six core elements of BPM: strategic alignment, governance, methods, information technology, people, and culture. These six elements serve as the structure for this BPM Handbook.

Business Process Management has no set methods of analysis for removing unneeded process steps, identifying inefficient or ineffective process steps, or simply determining which process steps to focus on for improvement. Often, tools and techniques from Six Sigma, an orientation to error-proofing that originated in the quality movement of the 1980s, are borrowed for those tasks. This chapter defines several Six Sigma techniques and shows how they can be used to improve deficient processes. The application of Six Sigma techniques is illustrated through a case study. Six Sigma can add to BPM efforts, however, it has few guidelines on how to choose techniques or redesign processes, thus requiring special skills and experience to add value to a process improvement project.

In order to execute, study, or improve operating procedures, companies document them as business process models. Often, business process analysts capture every single exception handling or alternative task handling scenario within a model. Such a tendency results in large process specifications. The core process logic becomes hidden in numerous modeling constructs. To fulfill different tasks, companies develop several model variants of the same business process at different abstraction levels. Afterwards, maintenance of such model groups involves a lot of synchronization effort and is erroneous. We propose an abstraction technique that allows generalization of process models. Business process model abstraction assumes a detailed model of a process to be available and derives coarse-grained models from it. The task of abstraction is to tell significant model elements from insignificant ones and to reduce the latter. We propose to learn insignificant process elements from supplementary model information, e.g., task execution time or frequency of task occurrence. Finally, we discuss a mechanism for user control of the model abstraction level – an abstraction slider.

Process modeling is a central element in any approach to Business Process Management (BPM). However, what hinders both practitioners and academics is the lack of support for assessing the quality of process models – let alone realizing high quality process models. Existing frameworks are highly conceptual or too general. At the same time, various techniques, tools, and research results are available that cover fragments of the issue at hand. This chapter presents the SIQ framework that on the one hand integrates concepts and guidelines from existing ones and on the other links these concepts to current research in the BPM domain. Three different types of quality are distinguished and for each of these levels concrete metrics, available tools, and guidelines will be provided. While the basis of the SIQ framework is thought to be rather robust, its external pointers can be updated with newer insights as they emerge.

The objective of this chapter is to describe and evaluate an approach for the automated analysis of business process models. It is described why an automated way of process analysis is necessary and why it is beneficial to use our approach. As business process models are moving in the center of decision making, it is important for the corresponding decision makers to get transparent, fast, and comprehensive results of process analysis. Dealing with huge amount of data this is only possible with automated support. Based on a comprehensive literature study, we identified different deviations and conflicts that usually arise in business process modeling projects. The class of semantic building block-based languages which combines structural modeling elements with corresponding domain semantics can help avoiding these conflicts. Beside the conceptual development of the language class we conducted an empirical evaluation of PICTURE, a business process modeling language that is an instantiation of semantic building block-based languages. Our results show that (a) our derived language class is applicable, (b) modeling conflicts significantly can be reduced, and (c) modeled data can be analyzed automatically.

In 2004, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) was presented as a standard business process modeling language. Its development was considered to be an important step in reducing the fragmentation that was witnessed between the existing process modeling tools and notations. Since then BPMN has been evaluated in different ways by the academic community and has become widely supported by the industry. After completing the first major revisions of BPMN, the Object Management Group (OMG) is working toward a new BPMN standard, BPMN 2.0. This chapter summarizes some of the evaluations of BPMN and presents these together with reported experiences as well as some examples of proposed extensions and future expectations based on these.

This chapter deals with advanced concepts for the configuration and management of business process variants. Typically, for a particular business process, different variants exist. Each of them constitutes an adjustment of a master process (e.g., a reference process) to specific requirements building the process context. Contemporary Business Process Management tools do not adequately support the modeling and management of such process variants. Either the variants have to be specified in separate process models or they are expressed in terms of conditional branches within the same process model. Both methods can result in high model redundancies, which make model adaptations a time-consuming and error-prone task. In this chapter, we discuss advanced concepts of our Provop approach, which provides a flexible and powerful solution for managing business process variants along their lifecycle. Such variant support will foster more systematic process configuration as well as process maintenance.

A significant development in business process modeling over recent years has involved the B2B choreography perspective, where message exchanges between collaborating partners are explicitly captured. Most of the proposals to date have focused on how message exchanges can be captured through a shared, global perspective between collaborating partners and used to enforce the ordering of individual message send and receive tasks within the processes of the partners. In the wider setting of analysis and design, the B2B perspective represents an important context through which requirements for information systems and their business processes are elicited, as seen through numerous informal methods and techniques. In this chapter, we address the gap between high-level analysis and detailed design concerning the B2B context, proposing extensions for choreography languages to allow for modeling of this context to be seamless across the analysis and design phases. Based on an example taken from the supply chain management domain, we identify three important requirements for extensions: functional scoping of different areas concerning a domain, which can then be modeled and related to each other in isolation; stepwise refinement of choreography models, reminiscent of classical analysis techniques; and the introduction of conversation semantics expressing the intent of logically related message exchanges of choreographies. Accordingly, we propose extensions to choreography modeling and an improved analysis of requirements, such as breakdowns in negotiations that take place between collaborating partners, using an adaptation of BPMN.

Business strategies need to be aligned with business process models. In this chapter, experiences from a collaborative process modeling effort performed at Intersport, Sweden, for the purpose of creating a solid base for taking a business into the future will be elaborated. In this effort, the new process design is aligned with strategic goals. By a codesign approach for deriving business process models, diverse stakeholders’ knowledge and interests are captured in the development of tangible descriptions of the future. Business plans are given a meaning, and participating actors become committed to implement business strategies.

Knowledge of modeling language syntax is usually not sufficient for building “good” process models. Profound modeling experience is required to apply a modeling language in practice. The productivity of users without any modeling experience is low and thus the quality of the modeling result may be unsatisfying if respective modeling tool support is missing. In this chapter, we present a recommendation-based editor for process modeling, which can help overcome this problem by reducing the need for the user to study the modeling notation and consequently direct her to focus on the model content. Early evaluations indicate the effectiveness of our approach, which goes beyond conventional modeling support for business processes.

Although simulation is typically considered as relevant and highly applicable, the use of simulation is limited in reality. Many organizations have tried to use simulation to analyze their business processes at some stage. However, few are using simulation in a structured and effective manner. This may be caused by a lack of training and limitations of existing tools, but in this chapter, we argue that there are also several additional and more fundamental problems. First of all, the focus is mainly on design while managers would also like to use simulation for operational decision making (solving the concrete problem at hand rather than some abstract future problem). Second, there is limited support for using existing artifacts such as historical data and workflow schemas. Third, the behavior of resources is modeled in a rather naive manner. This chapter focuses on the last problem. It proposes a new way of characterizing resource availability. The ideas are described and analyzed using CPN Tools. Experiments show that it is indeed possible to capture human behavior in business processes in a much better way. By incorporating better resource characterizations in contemporary tools, business process simulation can finally deliver on its outstanding promise.

This chapter reports on the experiences of an Australian government department in selecting a BPM tool to support its process modeling, analysis, and design activities. With the growing number of tools in the market that claim to support BPM, the variance in actual functionality supported by these tools, and the potentially significant cost of such a purchase, BPM tool selection has become an arduous task. While there is some independent guidance available on how various tools support different aspects of BPM initiatives, organizations still need to determine what their specific needs are and be able to establish how information gathered on tool functionality can be evaluated against these needs. The chapter presents the evaluation criteria that the Queensland Courts derived and used for their needs; the process followed to find and short-list candidate tools to evaluate; and a discussion on findings against the established criteria. While the requirements and evaluation criteria will differ for each organizational context, this chapter provides guidance for business managers on how they may structure and conduct a BPM tool evaluation from a business user perspective. In particular, it provides a score sheet tailored for a business process redesign initiative, which other organizations can use as a starting point and further refine to their specific needs. In addition, it provides suggestions on methods for identifying candidate tools for evaluation (i.e., via market research, on-site visits, gathering recommendations from experiences of others, etc.) from the multitude of BPM solutions currently available. The chapter also highlights the need for BPM tool vendors to invest more in understanding the varying needs of organizations across the BPM spectrum so as to provide accurate information to the right market in a way that potential business users/customers can understand.

Today, in the eyes of both customers and suppliers, product-related financial services take an eminent position. This does also apply to the automotive industry and its financial service providers (e.g., automotive banks). As a consequence, quality management and especially business process improvement methods (e.g. Six Sigma) attract growing attention in (the field of) financial services. Above all, the Six Sigma approach is being increasingly discussed in both literature and practice. This chapter is the result of the prototypical implementation of Six Sigma at an automotive bank; the focus is on the selection and the combination of quality techniques used at an automotive bank, the crucial points of the successful implementation.

Workflow management has its origin in the office automation systems of the seventies, but it is not until fairly recently that conceptual and technological breakthroughs have led to its widespread adoption. In fact, nowadays, process-awareness has become an accepted and integral part of various types of systems. Through the use of process-aware information systems, workflows can be specified and enacted, thus providing automated support for business processes. A workflow explicitly represents control-flow dependencies between the various tasks of the business process, the information that is required and that can be produced by them, and the link between these tasks and the resources, be they human or not, which can execute them. In this way, processes can be performed more efficiently and effectively, compliance with respect to standard procedures and practices can be monitored more closely, and rapid change in response to evolving market conditions can be achieved more easily. This chapter provides an overview of the field of workflow management.

This chapter presents a general framework of resource-driven workflows as an alternative to the more popular control flow-driven workflows approach. We argue that this approach is more holistic than control flow-driven approaches because it considers availability of resources such as data, people, equipment, space, etc. Control flow-driven approaches usually either disregard resource considerations or account for them only implicitly. In our approach, the control flow is a derivative of the resource needs of various tasks. Moreover, we make a clean separation between hard constraints that arise from resource considerations and soft constraints that result from business policy. The new methodology for process design is described at length, along with an architecture and a detailed discussion of implementation issues. This approach is more holistic and is particularly suited for ad hoc workflows as opposed to production workflows.

This chapter discusses some relationships between service-oriented architecture and Business Process Management. In particular, the chapter presents a method for analyzing a business process to enable its execution on top of a service-oriented application landscape, thereby leading to the notion of service-enabled business process. The chapter also provides an overview of contemporary technology standards for implementing service-enabled processes.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a framework for the design of business processes that manage shared capabilities. Shared capabilities can be engaged in multiple lines of business and achieve both economies of scale through consolidation and enterprise agility through the ability to configure new lines of business using existing capabilities. Capabilities are managed as service units that include the skills and resources to deliver well-defined services. In a transformed enterprise, service units engaged by each line of business become participants in a value chains that form the basis for optimization of operations and delivery of customer value.

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is typically presented from a software development perspective, viewing the enterprise as an extension of the distributed network management model. The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate that the business value of SOA derives from aligning business services with business processes that are enabled as composite applications. This aligned approach to service-oriented implementation is called Business Process Management to SOA (BPM to SOA). This chapter describes BPM to SOA in some detail, including an implementation perspective that is based on successful project delivery. The business benefits of BPM to SOA are presented, and the chapter asserts that the business case for SOA cannot be completed without aligning business services to end-to-end business processes.

Contemporary organizations are exposed to an environment that is changing at a continually increasing pace. Some of the external forces challenging organizations today are Business Network Transformation, Business Process Outsourcing, Web 2.0, the Internet of Services, the Internet of Things and the Changing Needs of End Users in organizations. In this environment, organizations must retain internal stability and focus on improving their core strengths to stay competitive and grow both their top and bottom lines. However, leveraging the full potential of each of these trends requires organizations to be agile, co-innovate within supply webs and continually redefine relationships. The major challenge that arises for Business Process Management and Semantic Interoperability (BPM&SI) research and future technology is the mitigation of risks arising from these conflicting themes. The purpose of this chapter is to motivate several research themes and technology research areas within the field of BPM&SI that will address this conflict in order to leverage the full potential of BPM in the future.

This chapter discusses the evolution of standards for BPM. The focus is on technology-related standards, especially on standards for specifying process models. A discussion of the two fundamental approaches for modeling processes, graph-based and operator-based, supports a better understanding of the evolution of standards. For each standard discussed, we describe its core concepts and its impact on the evolution of standards. The corresponding influence on the overall architecture of BPM environments is worked out.

United Nation’s Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) is an e-business standardization body known for its work on UN/EDIFACT and ebXML. One of its ongoing work items is the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) for modeling global choreographies of B2B scenarios. The work on UMM started in 1998 and has improved since then by contributions from participating organizations, such as RosettaNet, SWIFT, and GS 1. Today, all new UN/CEFACT standards for data exchange scenarios must be backed up by a corresponding UMM model. In this paper, we revisit the UMM version 1.0 that is defined as a UML 1.4 profile. We introduce the main concepts of UMM and elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of UMM 1.0. Being the editorial team of UMM, we have made improvements to UMM, which will be released shortly as a new standard version. Thus, we elaborate on the new concepts of UMM 2.0 that are further illustrated by means of a simple example.

This chapter discusses the main aspects of Enterprise 2.0, how they are already impacting BPM, and how BPM is likely to evolve into a more social environment in the future. In particular, the impacts include cultural effects of collaboration during process modeling and process execution, as well as technological impacts of newer user interface models, development techniques, and delivery mechanisms. In turn, these have economic impacts for both development and delivery models that become more relevant during the current economic recession.