A template-based approach for responsibility management in executable business processes

Process-oriented organisations need to manage the different types of responsibilities their employees may have w.r.t. the activities involved in their business processes. Despite several approaches provide support for responsibility modelling, in current Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) the only responsibility considered at runtime is the one related to performing the work required for activity completion. Others like accountability or consultation must be implemented by manually adding activities in the executable process model, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we address this limitation by enabling current BPMS to execute processes in which people with different responsibilities interact to complete the activities. We introduce a metamodel based on Responsibility Assignment Matrices (RAM) to model the responsibility assignment for each activity, and a flexible template-based mechanism that automatically transforms such information into BPMN elements, which can be interpreted and executed by a BPMS. Thus, our approach does not enforce any specific behaviour for the different responsibilities but new templates can be modelled to specify the interaction that best suits the activity requirements. Furthermore, libraries of templates can be created and reused in different processes. We provide a reference implementation and build a library of templates for a well-known set of responsibilities

Exploring Human Resource Management in Crowdsourcing Platforms

The correct execution of process activities is usually responsibility of the employees (i.e., human resources) of an organisation. In the last years, notable support has been developed to make resource management in business processes more efficient and customisable. Recently, a new way of working has emerged and caught significant attention in the market: crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing consists of outsourcing activities in the form of an open call to an undefined network of people, i.e., the crowd. While in traditional resource management in business processes resources are known and task assignment is usually controlled, the workers in crowdsourcing platforms are unknown and are allowed to select the tasks they want to perform. These and other di↵erences between resource management in business processes and in crowdsourcing platforms have not been explicitly investigated so far. Taking as reference the existing mature work on resource management in business processes, this paper presents the results of a study on the existing support for resource management in crowdsourcing platforms.Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) 845638 (SHAPE

The Logistic Maturity Model: Application to a Fashion Company

This paper describes the structure of the logistic maturity model (LMM) in detail and shows the possible improvements that can be achieved by using this model in terms of the identification of the most appropriate actions to be taken in order to increase the performance of the logistics processes in industrial companies. The paper also gives an example of the LMM’s application to a famous Italian female fashion firm, which decided to use the model as a guideline for the optimization of its supply chain. Relying on a 5-level maturity staircase, specific achievement indicators as well as key performance indicators and best practices are defined and related to each logistics area/process/sub-process, allowing any user to easily and rapidly understand the more critical logistical issues in terms of process immaturity

iSIM: An integrated design method for commercializing service innovation

© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. Service innovation is focused on customer value creation. At its core, customer centric service innovation is technology-enabled, human-centered, and process-oriented. To profit from such innovation, firms need an integrated cross-disciplinary, holistic method to design and commercialize service innovation. From diverse but interrelated strands of theories from service science, strategic management, organization science and information systems literatures, this article develops a new integrated design method, known as iSIM (integrated Service Innovation Method), for simultaneous service innovation and business model design for sustained customer value co-creation with the firm. Following design science research method, the article theoretically defines and integrates iSIM’s seven constitutive design process-elements: service strategy, customer type / value proposition, service concept, service system, customer experience, service architecture and monetization into a coherent and end-to-end aligned integrated design method. It explains how iSIM would be holistically and iteratively practiced by practitioners, and conceptually exemplifies its utility via telco and Amazon case studies using secondary data. Perspectives on iSIM from selected practitioners are discussed which confirm iSIM’s potential utility for their business. Managerial implications of implementing the iSIM and potential areas for further research are also discussed