S-BPM in the Wild

This is the first book to present field studies on the application of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM). Each case presents a specific story and focuses on an essential modeling or implementation issue, and most end with implications or suggestions for further studies. Significant variables and success factors are identified that were discovered during the respective study and lead to suggesting S-BPM novelties. For each case, the authors explain step-by-step how the story develops, and provide readers guidance by detailing the respective rationale. The studies covered are clustered according to three main S-BPM themes: Part I “Business Operation Support” documents approaches to the practical development of S-BPM solutions in various application domains and organizational settings, while Part II “Consultancy and Education Support” highlights cases that can help to train readers in S-BPM modeling and knowledge acquisition for S-BPM lifecycle iterations. It also refers to architecting S-BPM solutions for application cases based on hands-on experience. Part III “Technical Execution Support” focuses on concepts for utilizing specific theories and technologies to execute S-BPM models. It also addresses how to create reference models for certain settings in the field. Lastly, the appendix covers all relevant aspects needed to grasp S-BPM modeling and apply it based on fundamental examples. Its format reconciles semantic precision with syntactic rigor.>Addressing the needs of developers, educators and practitioners, this book will help companies to learn from the experiences of first-time users and to develop systems that fit their business processes, explaining the latest key methodological and technological S-BPM developments in the fields of training, research and application

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

SOA and BPM, a Partnership for Successful Organizations

In order to stay effective and competitive, companies have to be able to adapt themselves to permanent market requirements, to improve constantly their business process, to act as flexible and proactive economic agents. To achieve these goals, the IT systems within the organization have to be standardized and integrated, in order to provide fast and reliable data access to users both inside and outside the company. A proper system architecture for integrating company’s IT assets is a service oriented one. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that allows integration of the company’s business as linked, repeatable tasks called services. A subject closely related to SOA is Business Process Management (BPM), an approach that aims to improve business processes. The paper also presents some aspects of this topic, as well as the relationship between SOA and BPM. They complement each other and help companies improve their business performance.Information Systems, SOA, Web Services, BPM

Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: The Cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

In keeping with the proliferation of free software development initiatives and the increased interest in the business process management domain, many open source workflow and business process management systems have appeared during the last few years and are now under active development. This upsurge gives rise to two important questions: what are the capabilities of these systems? and how do they compare to each other and to their closed source counterparts? i.e. in other words what is the state-of-the-art in the area?. To gain an insight into the area, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of three of the major open source workflow management systems - jBPM, OpenWFE and Enhydra Shark, the results of which are reported here. This analysis is based on the workflow patterns framework and provides a continuation of the series of evaluations performed using the same framework on closed source systems, business process modeling languages and web-service composition standards. The results from evaluations of the three open source systems are compared with each other and also with the results from evaluations of three representative closed source systems - Staffware, WebSphere MQ and Oracle BPEL PM, documented in earlier works. The overall conclusion is that open source systems are targeted more toward developers rather than business analysts. They generally provide less support for the patterns than closed source systems, particularly with respect to the resource perspective which describes the various ways in which work is distributed amongst business users and managed through to completion

Business process trends

Business process and business process management (BPM) concepts have matured over the years and new technology, concepts, standards and solutions appear. In this chapter we will therefore focus on the current and future process trends. We will elaborate on the importance of trends, the maturity of the subject, giving a perspective on what emerging trends, industry trends, mega trends are, what is hyped at the moment, and what has reached a market adoption where it has started to become the de facto standard in terms of mega trends that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance

Subject-oriented plural method meets BPMN: a case study

Subject-oriented approach to business process management focuses on the subjects and their interactions with the aim to capture more accurate process information with increased fidelity. In a common setting, business processes are modeled by process engineers or modeling experts who often create their processes in a top-down fashion. However, this may pose risks to the acceptance and adoption of these models in practice, particularly in knowledge-centric environments. The Plural method follows a subject-oriented approach and allows process participants, rather than a centralized group of process engineers, to model and maintain their processes in a decentralized way. It guides process participants to focus on the roles and their interactions in terms of message exchanges. This study investigates the use of BPMN 2.0 for the Plural method. With the aim to show the applicability of the notation for a subject-oriented approach and report on the benefits and limitations of the new edition of the Plural method in general, we performed a case study in an industry company. Guided by a coordinator, 11 process participants modeled four processes that they participate by following the Plural method. These models were also compared with the classical models developed prior to the application of the Plural method to better understand the influence. Analyses showed that the application of the Plural resulted in more complete process models. However, there are concerns regarding the understandability of these models when compared with their classical counterparts. It has been shown that the Plural method is a powerful tool for process discovery and modeling, but an improvement on its models is needed to obtain full value of the framework

Synergizing the logistics processes and process management – framework of BPM course based on business cases, BPM standards and tools

Better processes produce lower costs, higher revenues, motivated employees, and happier customers. Logistics companies operating on very competitive market are continuously seeking opportunities to ensure the process reliability while improving their productivity. Due to increasing process complexity it is necessary to apply a systematic approach to designing, implementation, monitoring and improvement of processes in the organization. Such approach may be realized through Business Process Management (BPM) techniques and tools. An investment in BPM software, coupled with new approaches to project implementation, enables companies to introduce a sustainable business process improvement program. However,  the  implementation  of BPM is  not  easy because of process complexity and multiplication of interaction specific for each organization.    In this paper we propose some teaching frameworks, that can be used during the education process to enhance the practical skills in BPMN and in the application of process management in the field of logistics. Our solution is based on practical cases and BPM worldwide standards. It provides students with the opportunity to use the BPM suites software in complex environment and practice the techniques of modelling and analyzing processes. The presented framework may address many of requirements of learning environments for business process analysts. In the second part of the article we present also the analysis of students’ (attendants’ of BPM classes) opinions about gaining knowledge and skills on BPM. Performed research indicate that young people were keen on business process modeling classes organized in a form of problem-based laboratories and they would like to use learned BPM methods and tools in their future education or work

SOA and BPM, a Partnership for Successful Organizations

In order to stay effective and competitive, companies have to be able to adapt themselves to permanent market requirements, to improve constantly their business process, to act as flexible and proactive economic agents. To achieve these goals, the IT systems within the organization have to be standardized and integrated, in order to provide fast and reliable data access to users both inside and outside the company. A proper system architecture for integrating company's IT assets is a service oriented one. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that allows integration of the company’s business as linked, repeatable tasks called services. A subject closely related to SOA is Business Process Management (BPM), an approach that aims to improve business processes. The paper also presents some aspects of this topic, as well as the relationship between SOA and BPM. They complement each other and help companies improve their business performance

Towards Connecting Online Interfacing and Internal Core Business Processes

Nowadays, organisations tend to do more business online by enabling their business processes to interact with customers, suppliers, etc., via different online channels. On the other hand, their core business processes, such as production, engineering, etc., may still stay inside the organisation. As a consequence, this makes an organisation rely on the collaboration between these two types of business processes to conduct its business, and this collaboration brings issues like multiple instance correlation, process view, and process evolution, to the business process management (BPM) of the organisation. This paper reports our research in progress on these issues. It firstly identifies the requirements to fully support such collaboration, and then presents a framework to illustrate how the collaboration can be facilitated using latest BPM technologies. This framework provides a reference architecture to incorporating online interfacing and internal core business processes