BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL ANTI-PATTERNS: A BIBLIOGRAPHY AND TAXONOMY OF PUBLISHED WORK

Patterns have been proven to be useful for documenting reusable solutions to common problems. A recently published bibliography of business process model patterns shed light into the various types of patterns by providing a systematic categorization of these patterns. In this way, such classification improves the understanding of business process model patterns. Anti-patterns document a counterproductive solution to a commonly occurring problem. While a classification for the large body of literature on business process model patterns is available, a structured bibliography of anti-patterns is missing. Related work on anti-patterns discusses patterns for common modeling errors, problems in business process models as well as in the business processes. Modeling experts should be aware of all these types of anti-patterns. To fill this gap, this paper presents a bibliography of business process model anti-patterns and a taxonomy of anti-patterns that has been developed using an established approach for taxonomy development. Both are based on an literature review and are valuable for people during the design and analysis phases of business processes since knowledge about anti-patterns in business process models helps for increasing their quality. Our overview should also be useful for developers of modeling tools who wish to make the modeler aware of potential modeling problems

Investigating the Effort of Using Business Process Management Technology: Results from a Controlled Experiment

Business Process Management (BPM) technology has become an important instrument for supporting complex coordination scenarios and for improving business process performance. When considering its use, however, enterprises typically have to rely on vendor promises or qualitative reports. What is still missing and what is demanded by IT decision makers are quantitative evaluations based on empirical and experimental research. This paper picks up this demand and illustrates how experimental research can be applied to technologies enabling enterprises to coordinate their business processes and to associate them with related artifacts and resources. The conducted experiment compares the effort for implementing and maintaining a sample business process either based on standard workflow technology or on a case handling system. We motivate and describe the experimental design, discuss threats for the validity of our experimental results (as well as risk mitigations), and present the results of our experiment. In general, more experimental research is needed in order to obtain valid data on the various aspects and effects of BPM technology and BPM tools