Business process and practice alignment meta-model

Business Process Modelling (BPM) is one of the most important phases of information system design. Business Process meta-models allow capturing informational and behavioural aspects of business processes. Unfortunately, standard business process meta-modelling approaches, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Meta-model, Quality-Oriented Business Process Meta-Model (QOBPM) and Transactional Meta-Model for Business Process (TMBP) focus just on process description, providing different business process models. According to these meta-modelling approaches, it is not possible to compare and identify related daily practices in order to improve business process models. This lack of information recognizes that further research in Business Process (BP) meta-model is needed to reflect the evolution/change on software processes. Considering this limitation in BP meta-modelling, this paper presents a comparative study of the most recognized business process meta-models approaches and introduces a new BP meta-model designed by Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model (BPPAMeta-model). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and propose a business process meta-model that addresses features related to the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Applying the business process and practice alignment meta-model: Daily practices and process modelling

Background: Business Process Modelling (BPM) is one of the most important phases of information system design. Business Process (BP) meta-models allow capturing informational and behavioural aspects of business processes. Unfortunately, standard BP meta-modelling approaches focus just on process description, providing different BP models. It is not possible to compare and identify related daily practices in order to improve BP models. This lack of information implies that further research in BP meta-models is needed to reflect the evolution/change in BP. Considering this limitation, this paper introduces a new BP meta-model designed by Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model (BPPAMeta-model). Our intention is to present a meta-model that addresses features related to the alignment between daily work practices and BP descriptions. Objectives: This paper intends to present a meta-model which is going to integrate daily work information into coherent and sound process definitions. Methods/Approach: The methodology employed in the research follows a design-science approach. Results: The results of the case study are related to the application of the proposed meta-model to align the specification of a BP model with work practices models. Conclusions: This meta-model can be used within the BPPAM methodology to specify or improve business processes models based on work practice descriptions

A Meta-model of Alignment

The literature on IS alignment is extensive, has developed significantly in the last twenty-five years, and is itself based on fifteen years of prior work exploring the strategic possibilities of information systems. Several important models have now been developed, but it is not always clear how they relate to each other. This can be problematic for practitioners, as it is not clear how, and indeed when, alignment can benefit an organization. It can be problematic for academics, in that gaps and areas for further research cannot be systematically identified. Furthermore, most alignment studies are motivated by two considerations that have themselves changed over time. First, IS alignment can bring strategic benefits to an organization, and second, alignment is consistently ranked highly as a key issue for IS managers. Over twenty-five years, there have been several key developments in strategic theory, and the issues being addressed by IS managers have changed significantly. This article addresses both problems by providing a meta-model of alignment studies, based on their relationship to different strategic theories. It populates the meta-model with examples of previous studies and demonstrates how it can be used by practitioners and academics

An agile business process and practice meta-model

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses the discovery, modelling, monitoring, analysis and improvement of business processes. Limitations of traditional BPM approaches in addressing changes in business requirements have resulted in a number of agile BPM approaches that seek to accelerate the redesign of business process models. Meta-models are a key BPM feature that reduce the ambiguity of business process models. This paper describes a meta-model supporting the agile version of the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM) for business process improvement, which captures process information from actual work practices. The ability of the meta-model to achieve business process agility is discussed and compared with other agile meta-models, based on definitions of business process flexibility and agility found in the literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Aligning OCL with UML

OCL is widely used by UML and other languages to constrain meta-models and perform evaluations on models. Unfortunately no OCL 2.x specification has ever been aligned with any UML 2.x specification. This lack of alignment makes some OCL compliance points such as XMI interchange unachievable. This paper describes how introduction of an OCL Pivot Meta-Model and clear exposition of the Values package may provide a solution to the alignment and a variety of other specification issues

Compare More Nuanced:Pairwise Alignment Bilinear Network For Few-shot Fine-grained Learning

The recognition ability of human beings is developed in a progressive way. Usually, children learn to discriminate various objects from coarse to fine-grained with limited supervision. Inspired by this learning process, we propose a simple yet effective model for the Few-Shot Fine-Grained (FSFG) recognition, which tries to tackle the challenging fine-grained recognition task using meta-learning. The proposed method, named Pairwise Alignment Bilinear Network (PABN), is an end-to-end deep neural network. Unlike traditional deep bilinear networks for fine-grained classification, which adopt the self-bilinear pooling to capture the subtle features of images, the proposed model uses a novel pairwise bilinear pooling to compare the nuanced differences between base images and query images for learning a deep distance metric. In order to match base image features with query image features, we design feature alignment losses before the proposed pairwise bilinear pooling. Experiment results on four fine-grained classification datasets and one generic few-shot dataset demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms both the state-ofthe-art few-shot fine-grained and general few-shot methods.Comment: ICME 2019 Ora

Meta-Modeling And Structural Paradigm For Strategic Alignment Of Information System

The information system is strongly sensitive to strategic evolutions of the enterprise: organisational change, change of objectives, modified variety, new objects and business processes, etc. With the objective to control strategic alignment of information systems, we propose an approach based on our extended enterprise meta-model ISO/DSI 19440. This extension is borrowed from the COBIT framework for IT processes. In order to better lead evolutions of the information system, this extension integrates necessary structures for developing systemic tools, based on a structural paradigm. In this work we propose to build an extension of the meta-model ISO 19440, so that we can explicitly bring the issue of alignment of various aspects of the information system. The strengths of the strategic alignment are interactions and couplings between different views of the meta-model: the interaction between activities and resources, the linkage between business processes and activities, the resource interdependence of entities and objects of the enterprise, the coupling between the capabilities and resources, etc. We propose to use the COBIT best practices for driving IT processes. Thus we add the abstract concept objective which will be specialized. We will also add a specialization of functional entity to model IT processes. In this work, we also offer a variety of algebraic structures to establish structural measures on the information system. For each class of structure we define its role and contribution to the governance of the information system

ALIGNMENT BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS OBJECTIVES: MULTIPLE CASE STUDIES

This paper presents an exploratory study on the alignment between organizational objectives, as formalized in the business plans, and the information provided by Information Systems (IS) in order to monitor these objectives. The research was based on multiple case studies and meta-analysis, and tried to verify the existence of IS strategic information that supports the organizational objectives. The aim of the study was the identification of a set of variables that represents the relationship between organizational and IS objectives defined in the strategic plan, which configure the informational integration element described in the operational model of strategic alignment of Brodbeck and Hoppen [4]. The main results indicate that alignment promotion will be intensified if the companies establish an informational model, representative of the business management, that integrates the organizational objectives and the IS information in several levels (infra-structure and processes)