The Repercussions of Business Process Modeling Notations on Mental Load and Mental Effort

Over the last decade, plenty business process modeling notations emerged for the documentation of business processes in enterprises. During the learning of a modeling notation, an individual is confronted with a cognitive load that has an impact on the comprehension of a notation with its underlying formalisms and concepts. To address the cognitive load, this paper presents the results from an exploratory study, in which a sample of 94 participants, divided into novices, intermediates, and experts, needed to assess process models expressed in terms of eight different process modeling notations, i.e., BPMN 2.0, Declarative Process Modeling, eGantt Charts, EPCs, Flow Charts, IDEF3, Petri Nets, and UML Activity Diagrams. The study focus was set on the subjective comprehensibility and accessibility of process models reflecting participant's cognitive load (i.e., mental load and mental effort). Based on the cognitive load, a factor reflecting the mental difficulty for comprehending process models in different modeling notations was derived. The results indicate that established modeling notations from industry (e.g., BPMN) should be the first choice for enterprises when striving for process management. Moreover, study insights may be used to determine which modeling notations should be taught for an introduction in process modeling or which notation is useful to teach and train process modelers or analysts. \keywords{Business Process Modeling Notations, Cognitive Load, Mental Load, Mental Effort, Human-centered Desig

Business integration models in the context of web services.

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. The rapid development of the Web, in particular, the introduction of the semantic web and web service technologies, enables business processes, modeling and management to enter an entirely new stage. Traditional web based business data and transactions can now be analyzed, extracted and modeled to discover new business rules and to form new business strategies, let alone mining the business data in order to classify customers or products. In this paper, we investigate and analyze the business integration models in the context of web services using a micro-payment system because a micro-payment system is considered to be a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case to discuss and illustrate how the web services approaches support and transform the business process and integration model.

RBPMN: A role-based BPMN for integrating structure and behavior models

Digitalization transforms business processes substantially due to increasing customer demands for flexibility, new technologies (e.g., Intelligent Technologies) and emerging markets. Business process models are used to understand current processes and provide guidance for process improvements. A role-based extension of the de-facto standard business process modeling language BPMN is proposed that can support the business transformation and other modeling challenges. Bachmann and Daya (1977) introduced roles, which provide the basis for the extension. Steimann (2000) and Kühn (2017) increased the understanding of roles and provided an overview of roles' versatility. This work incorporates roles in business process modeling, thereby closing the gap between structural and behavioral modeling.:Contents List of figures II List of tables III 1 Introduction 1 2 Background 1 3 Business Process Modeling Challenges 3 3.1 Variety of Performers 3 3.2 Adaptability 4 3.3 Context-Awareness 4 4 Proposing Roles as a Solution 5 5 The Role-based Business Process Model and Notation 7 5.1 BPMN Extension Mechanism 8 5.2 Composition of Roles in a Business Process 9 5.2.1 Active Roles 9 5.2.2 Passive Roles 9 5.3 Connector Elements 10 5.3.1 Role Prohibition 10 5.3.2 Role Inheritance 10 5.3.3 Role Condition 10 5.4 Location Role 10 5.5 Role Start Event 10 5.6 Gateways 11 5.7 RBPMN Syntax 11 5.8 Process Role Hierarchy 12 6 Role-Feature Integration 12 7 Modeling Case Study 14 8 Discussion 16 9 Conclusion 17 10 Acknowledgments 18 References I

Building and Exploiting a Business Process Model for Lobbying: Experience Report

The paper describes a project in the domain of business process modeling that concerns loosely-structured business processes, i.e. processes for which it is difficult to establish an order of activities. The process in focus is the lobbying process, i.e. a process aimed at influencing decisions of others, e.g. politicians. The project was carried out at a non-profit interest organization, and the paper describes the project’s motivation, structure, methodology, results, and how the results were exploited, including a short description of an IT system built to support the lobbying process. As the commonly spread workflow technique is not particularly suitable for loosely-structured business processes, the project exploited an original state-flow technique for developing a model of the lobbying process. The state-flow technique is based on the state-oriented view on business processes that has been used as a foundation for building the support system. The paper reports a number of problems encountered during the introduction of the system into operational practice. These problems led to the needs of reducing the level of details initially introduced into the system; they will be reintroduced at the later stage when the users become more accustomed to work in the process-oriented manner. In the conclusion, the paper discusses success factors important for modeling projects, and pros and cons of the modeling method used, as well as a broader research context of which the work presented in the paper is a part

Integrated Modeling of Process- and Data-Centric Software Systems with PHILharmonicFlows

Process- and data-centric software systems require a tight integration of processes, functions, data, and users. Thereby, the behavioral perspective is described by process models, while the information perspective is captured in a data model. Eliciting and capturing requirements of such software systems in a consistent way is a challenging task, demanding that both process and data model are well aligned and consistent with each other. While traditional software modeling languages do not allow for an explicit integration of data and process models, activity-centric process modeling languages tend to neglect the role of data as a driver of process execution; i.e., business objects are usually outside the control of the process, normally stored in external databases. To overcome this drawback, PHILharmonicFlows provides a comprehensive framework for enabling object-aware process support. In addition, a sound specification of process- and object-centric software systems becomes possible. In this paper, we present a requirements modeling approach that provides methodological guidance for modeling large process- and data-centric software systems based on PHILharmonicFlows. Such guidance will foster the introduction of respective software systems in the large scale

GESTÃO DE PROCESSOS E TECNOLOGIA DE INFORMAÇÃO: EM BUSCA DA AGILIDADE EM SERVIÇO

Organizations grappling with a variety of problems arising from the rapid of information technology (IT) development and the tension caused by the delay in the introduction of this evolution in business management models. The greatest difficulties are in creating an operating environment in which the speeds of decision-making and organizational performance are keys to agility services. Thecombination of IT, as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services (WS) with Business Process Management (BPM), promise to revolutionize the way organizations is structured to create an operating environment able to expedite decision-making and tomake better use of business opportunities. However, these technologies still face challenges that need to be overcome. Based on the literature review, the scope of this article is to discuss the main issues of organizational modeling technology and present a proposal for a conceptual model targeted for businessagility

Modeling Business Processes of the Social Insurance Fund in Information System Runa WFE

Introduction - Business processes are gradually becoming a tool that allows you at a new level to put employees or to make more efficient document management system. In these directions the main work, and presents the largest possible number of publications. However, business processes are still poorly implemented in public institutions, where it is very difficult to formalize the main existing processes. Us attempts to build a system of business processes for such state agencies as the Russian social insurance Fund (SIF), where virtually all of the processes, when different inputs have the same output: public service. The parameters of the state services (as a rule, time limits) are set by state laws and regulations. The article provides a brief overview of the FSS, the formulation of requirements to business processes, the justification of the choice of software for modeling business processes and create models of work in the system Runa WFE and optimization models one of the main business processes of the FSS. The result of the work of Runa WFE is an optimized model of the business process of FSS

Πεδιακή ανάλυση συνθετικών μονωτήρων υψηλής τάσης με τη μέθοδο πεπερασμένων στοιχείων

Companies must be able to demonstrate that their way of doing business is compliant with relevant rules and regulations. However, the law often has open texture; it is generic and needs to be interpreted before it can be applied in a specific case. Entrepreneurs generally lack the expertise to engage in the regulatory conversations that make up this interpretation process. In particular, for the application domain of technological startups, this leads to legal risks. This research seeks to develop a robust module for legal interpretation. We apply informal logic to bridge the gap between the principles of interpretation in legal theory with the legal rules that determine the compliance of business processes. Accordingly, interpretive arguments characterized by argument schemes are applied to business models represented by value modeling (VDML). The specific outcome of the argumentation process (if any) is then summarized into a compliance pattern, in a context-problem-solution format. Two case studies in the application area of startups shows that the approach is able to express the legal arguments, but is also understandable for the target audience. The project is presented in two parts; Part I, the background, contains an introduction, literature review, motivational case studies, a survey on legal risks, and a modeling of business and legal aspects. Part II builds on the interdisciplinary facets of the first part to develop the Compliance Patterns Framework which is then validated with two case studies followed by a conclusion

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems: Challenges, Methods, Technologies

In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The attached pdf file gives a preview on Chapter 3 of the book which explains the book's overall structure

Paving the Road to Business Process Administration

Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) have been helped to achieve an important role in business process modeling by the commercial success of SAP and ARIS. Both users and IT experts may describe the process to be modelled from their individual perspectives. Event-driven Process Chains, therefore, create a common platform for communication and the analysis of ideas beyond the boundaries of both application and information-system domains. This is accomplished by a semiformal semantics, which gives the participants greater freedom of expression but leads to unintended ambiguities clearly undesirable in later stages of development such as design and implementation. In the literature, several approaches to this problem have been suggested including definitions of a formal semantics for EPCs. We investigate difficulties with such approaches and suggest two solutions: the introduction of a new logical connector (XORAND) and a slight modification of the OR join. This facilitates the design of correct EPCs while continuing to allow freedom of expression, thus enabling a smoother transition into the more formal phases of software development such as design and implementation. A comparative experiment validates these results