Enabling situational awareness of business processes

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explore the ways of integrating situational awareness into business process management for the purpose of realising hyper automated business processes. Such business processes will help improve their customer experiences, enhance the reliability of service delivery and lower the operational cost for a more competitive and sustainable business. Design/methodology/approach: Ontology has been deployed to establish the context modelling method, and the event handling mechanisms are developed on the basis of event calculus. An approach on performance of the proposed approach has been evaluation by checking the cost savings from the simulation of a large number of business processes. Findings: In this research, the authors have formalised the context presentation for a business process with a focus on rules and entities to support context perception; proposed a system architecture to illustrate the structure and constitution of a supporting system for intelligent and situation aware business process management; developed real-time event elicitation and interpretation mechanisms to operationalise the perception of contextual dynamics and real-time responses; and evaluated the applicability of the proposed approaches and the performance improvement to business processes. Originality/value: This paper presents a framework covering process context modelling, system architecture and real-time event handling mechanisms to support situational awareness of business processes. The reported research is based on our previous work on radio frequency identification-enabled applications and context-aware business process management with substantial extension to process context modelling and process simulation. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

A KNOWLEDGE-BASED APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF BUSINESS TRANSACTION PROCESSING SYSTEMS

In this paper, we propose a new approach to the analysis and design of management information systems. While previous methods were either syntactic in nature (structured analysis and design, problem statement languages) or focused on the user-analyst interaction (user-controlled design, prototyping), our method - while compatible with both - additionally incorporates the experiential knowledge gained from the thousands of systems in operation today. This goal is achieved through providing the systems analyst with a business systems architecture (BSA) consisting of two parts: a set of rules representing the knowledge about a generalized application domain, and a domain-specific database architecture that enforces these rules. The rules can also be used to check the design of existing systems and to guide the analysis process for new systems. The paper describes a BSA for transaction processing systems. The approach can be applied in a similar way to other application domains such as decision support systems.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

A KNOWLEDGE-BASED APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF BUSINESS TRANSACTION PROCESSING SYSTEMS

In this paper, we propose a new approach to the analysis and design of management information systems. While previous methods were either syntactic in nature (structured analysis and design, problem statement languages) or focused on the user-analyst interaction (user-controlled design, prototyping), our method - while compatible with both - additionally incorporates the experiential knowledge gained from the thousands of systems in operation today. This goal is achieved through providing the systems analyst with a business systems architecture (BSA) consisting of two parts: a set of rules representing the knowledge about a generalized application domain, and a domain-specific database architecture that enforces these rules. The rules can also be used to check the design of existing systems and to guide the analysis process for new systems. The paper describes a BSA for transaction processing systems. The approach can be applied in a similar way to other application domains such as decision support systems.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Managing CoDesign in dynamic alliance networks

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The research described in this thesis develops ways to support creativity in dynamic business networks. Businesses in a business network are organized to bring their knowledge and assets together to develop new services and products. Traditionally business networks were stable. However, the changing nature of the business environment calls for new knowledge, which is increasingly met by bringing in new businesses with the new knowledge into the network and often changing the network structure. At the same time greater creativity and innovation are needed to address the emerging problems. Consequently, networks must create the environment that supports members from businesses working together to combine their knowledge to create innovative solutions. The design process is thus becoming increasingly collaborative as product design emerges as new ideas emerge. There is more emphasis on supporting collaborative design (CoDesign) where individuals and teams from different disciplines, including customers, consumers and users work together in the design process. Although CoDesign itself is now well-understood, how to manage it within a dynamic networking environment given greater emphasis on privacy and knowledge is still not well understood. The research described in this thesis will contribute to knowledge of how to integrate business networking arrangements with CoDesign while maintaining knowledge sharing and privacy. To do this we have developed a model that will contribute to knowledge of how to integrate business networking arrangements with CoDesign and enable knowledge sharing and privacy. To develop the model we have analysed existing business network structures, classified them by a set of concepts and developed a model that covers existing practices, integrates structure with CoDesign and supports dynamic change to networking arrangements. The model is made up of two levels – the business networking level and the design level. The business networking level defines the responsibilities of businesses and the privacy constraints. In the model, teams are created across the businesses and organisations. The design level is where these teams carry out CoDesign. The model describes ways for such networks to change as people in businesses join and resign over the time and the governance structures to preserve privacy. The design level is facilitated by providing people in businesses with an environment to create and share knowledge for CoDesign. Knowledge management related research has been investigated as the CoDesign process is considered knowledge management intensive. In the networking level the model defines spaces where people in businesses join and agree on collaborative activities. In the creativity level those people are provided with tools where they can create and share knowledge. In the thesis we show how Design Thinking tools are introduced to support creativity in the CoDesign process. However, the model can support any tools needed for some special problem. Maintaining privacy is considered where rules and policies are defined to control accessing the knowledge and other components. The model has been defined and a prototype has been implemented to evaluate the model by following the qualitative method. The model has been evaluated by conducting semi-structured interviews with experts. The experts agree that the model supports creativity in the dynamic business networks. However, their advice for future work and development should be considered

Requirements engineering for electronic healthcare records

This thesis investigates requirements engineering methods based on process modelling for Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) systems. The relation between software requirements and user workflows is essential in healthcare settings: EHRs are expected to improve clinical and administrative workflows. In turn, the new workflows are expected to satisfy a number of business goals. If a new software system does not support the desired clinical workflows or patient journeys, then its value and benefits are often disputed by stakeholders. Our hypothesis is that requirements engineering methods based on process models will contribute to the overall success of EHR projects in the industry. By success, we mean software systems that are in use and meet the business benefits expected of them. The experiments presented in this thesis are aimed to develop and evaluate a method that allows business analysts to make use of process models during requirements engineering for EHRs. The goal of the method is to ensure the software specification is aligned to and supports the user workflows. Each of the four experiments addresses a specific research objective, and thus the findings from each experiment constitute the basis for one of our four contributions to science. / Experiment 1: Relating Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering and Process Modelling: This experiment investigates the design of a common framework for describing process models and software requirements. It relates the KAOS framework for goal oriented requirements engineering and the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Our goal is to facilitate requirements elicitation. Specifically, business analysts using our framework should be able to reason about the alignment of the software specification to the business processes, and identify specific changes that improve this alignment (either changes in the design of the system, or changes in the business processes). This first experiment was conducted as part of the WellbeingUCL project, supported by Boots. / Experiment 2: Inferring Goal Models from Process Models: The second experiment investigates a method for business analysts to derive software requirements from process models. The purpose for defining such a method is to provide sufficient guidance to business analysts, during requirements elicitation. Our aim is to help business analysts elicit meaningful goal models and shape the design of the system-to-be, in light of these goals. A number of heuristics to facilitate requirements elicitation are proposed and evaluated, considering the trade-offs between a fully automated and a human driven process. / Experiment 3: Electronic Healthcare Record for Bupa: The third experiment evaluates the requirements engineering method during an EHR implementation for a chronic condition management service delivered by Bupa nurses in South West England. Action research is used to assess the impact and fit of the requirements elicitation process, in relation to the current work practices of business analysts in the industry. The extended KAOS framework and goal inference heuristics have been used to inform the final software specification, guide the workflow redesign and clarify the business benefits. From a project management perspective, this experiment evaluates how the KAOS method aligns with the Agile and Lean methodologies used in Bupa. The project has delivered an EHR system actively used to support the care of 2,600 patients. / Experiment 4: Personal Health Record for Nuffield Health: The fourth experiment evaluates the extended KAOS framework when developing a new digital customer proposition with an underlying EHR system. It investigates how consumer journeys can be modelled as KAOS process models. Of specific interest is the ability of the framework to clarify the responsibility assignments among the different agents (i.e. system components) that need to collaborate to deliver the end to end customer journey. The experiment was run as an action research project, in partnership with Nuffield Health. The results have informed the architecture of an open source personal health record for lifestyle data. / Contributions to science: This thesis advances the field of requirements engineering by introducing and evaluating a requirements elicitation method based on business process models. It also presents new evidence into the use of goal oriented requirements engineering for the design and implementation of EHR systems in the industry. Our four contributions to science directly follow from the results of the four experiments conducted as part of this research. Our first two contributions cover the conceptual framework and our proposed method for requirement elicitation based on process models. Our last two contributions present evidence for the practical use and benefits of our goal oriented requirements engineering method in industry based projects. First, we present an extension of the KAOS requirements engineering framework which includes a business process view with clearly defined syntax and execution semantic. This approach ensures process models and goal models have a shared semantic. A new concept, that of Intentional Fragment, captures the explicit relation between fragments of a process model and a specific goal. We also define additional consistency rules, to clarify how the process view relates with other KAOS models: object, agent and operation model. Secondly, we present a set of goal inference techniques to help analysts build goal models starting from process models. In effect, analysts can start from the artefacts that are most familiar to them (i.e. the workflow models) and gradually derive a goal model for the system-to-be. A set of 12 heuristics have been fully defined and integrated into a semi-structured method for goal elicitation. Our third contribution is an evaluation of how the goal oriented requirements engineering method (incorporating workflow analysis) supports the design and deployment of a EHR system in a clinical setting. The project was representative for the challenges faced by healthcare organisations wishing to deploy EHRs: quality of care standards that impose constraints on process redesign; legacy systems that have shaped the workflow; organisational complexity and competing stakeholder interests. We show that by methodically applying our goal inference techniques we were able to produce a valid goal model starting from models of the nurses workflows. The resulting goal model was used to reason about alternative design options in the system-to-be, and to clarify the benefit case in deploying the EHR system. Fourth, we examine the requirements engineering process for an EHR system meant to support a new customer proposition. This project was representative for the challenges faced in the digital health industry: a target consumer journey driven by user experience research; many different systems required to collaborate; focus on the architectural design of the system. We show that we can apply our goal inference techniques to customer journey maps and produce a meaningful goal model. This has been used to shape the architecture of the EHR system and reason about integration requirements. We also argue that our goal inference techniques complement agile development practices used within the organisation

Using agent based simulation to empirically examine complexity in carbon footprint business process

Through the critical analysis of the extant literature, it is observed that Simulation is widely used as a research method in Natural Sciences, Engineering and Social Sciences, in addition to argumentation and formalisation as the third way of carrying out research. Simulation is not so widely used in Business and Management research as it ought to have been, though this is changing for the better with the technological advances in computers and their computational power. These technological advances enhance the capability of theoretical research models, in defining a problem and their use in empirically examining a solution to the problem in simulated reality, like never before. Management journal searches for “Simulation and Complexity Theory” returned nil or zero returns, which explain that this combination is not popular in management research, though they are used individually more often. The major objective of this paper is to analyse some of the conceptual (or theoretical) and methodological (or empirical) contributions that Agent Based Simulation and Complexity Theory can make to the business and management community in their business process related research In view of this, some basic ideas are discussed of using Agent Based Simulation as a method in Business and Management Studies research and how an Agent Based Model can be applied to a business process as complex as Carbon Footprint. It is in this context that the use of Complexity as the base theory to empirically examine a business process is discussed. Throughout this article, our research on complex adaptive systems (e.g., Accounting Information System) in continuously changing organisations managing complex business processes (e.g., Carbon Footprint business process) is considered as the basis for illustrating some of the concepts. Through this article, avenues for further management research using these tools and methodology are suggested

Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario

Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension

AutoTaSC : Model driven development for autonomic software engineering

Whilst much research progress has been achieved towards the development of autonomic software engineering tools and techniques including: policy-based management, modelbased development, service-oriented architecture and model driven architecture. They have often focused on and started from chosen object-oriented models of required software behaviour, rather than domain model including user intentions and/or software goals. Such an approach is often reported to lead to "misalignment" between business process layer and their associated computational enabling systems. This is specifically noticeable in adaptive and evolving business systems and/or processes settings. To address this long-standing problem research has over the years investigated many avenues to close the gap between business process modelling and the generation of enactment (computation) layer, which is responsive to business changes. Within this problem domain, this research sets out to study the extension of the Model Driven Development (MOD) paradigm to business/domain model, that is, how to raise the abstraction level of model-driven software development to the domain level and provide model synchronisation to trace and analyse the impact of a given model change. The main contribution of this research is the development of a MOD-based design method for autonomic systems referred to as AutoTaSC. The latter consists of a series of related models, where each of which represents the system under development at a given stage. The first and highest level model represents the abstract model referred to as the Platform Independent Model (PIM). The next model encapsulates the PIM model for the autonomic system where the autonomic capabilities and required components (such as monitor, sensor, actuator, analyser, policy, etc.) are added via some appropriate transformation rules. Targeting a specific technology involves adding, also via transformation rules, specific information related to that platform from which the Platform Specific Model (PSM) for the autonomic system is extracted. In the last stage, code can be generated for the specific platform or technology targeted in the previous stage, web services for instance. In addition, the AutoTaSC method provides a situated model synchronisation mechanism, which is designed following the autonomic systems principles. For instance, to guarantee model synchronisation each model from each AutoTaSC stage has an associated policy-based feedback control loop, which regulates its reaction to detected model change. Thus, AutaTase method model transformation approach to drive model query, view and synchronisation. The Auto'Iast? method was evaluated using a number of benchmark case-studies to test this research hypothesis including the effectiveness and generality of AutaTaSe design method

An Ontology-Based Method for Semantic Integration of Business Components

Building new business information systems from reusable components is today an approach widely adopted and used. Using this approach in analysis and design phases presents a great interest and requires the use of a particular class of components called Business Components (BC). Business Components are today developed by several manufacturers and are available in many repositories. However, reusing and integrating them in a new Information System requires detection and resolution of semantic conflicts. Moreover, most of integration and semantic conflict resolution systems rely on ontology alignment methods based on domain ontology. This work is positioned at the intersection of two research areas: Integration of reusable Business Components and alignment of ontologies for semantic conflict resolution. Our contribution concerns both the proposal of a BC integration solution based on ontologies alignment and a method for enriching the domain ontology used as a support for alignment.Comment: IEEE New Technologies of Distributed Systems (NOTERE), 2011 11th Annual International Conference; ISSN: 2162-1896 Print ISBN: 978-1-4577-0729-2 INSPEC Accession Number: 12122775 201