Designing Business Processes with History-Aware Resource Assignments

Human resources are actively involved in business process management (BPM), due to their participation in the execution of the work developed within business process (BP) activities. They, thus, constitute a crucial aspect in BP design. Different approaches have been recently introduced aiming at extending existing BP modelling notations to improve their capabilities for human resource management. However, the scope of the proposals is usually quite limited, and most of them provide ad-hoc solutions for specific scenarios. Resource Assignment Language (RAL) was developed just to overcome such shortcomings, being independent of the modelling notation in which it is used, and providing interesting resource analysis mechanisms. Still, RAL is currently focused on a single BP instance and, thus, resource assignments cannot contain constraints between two process instances. in this paper, we introduce a complete (i.e. syntactical and semantical) extension for RAL to provide it with history-aware expressions. These expressions will, in turn, be able to be automatically resolved and analysed along with the other RAL expressions, thanks to RAL’s semantics based on Description Logics (DLs)

CHANGE – “THE ENGINE” OF EXISTENCE. CASE STUDY:ROMANIA AND ITS CONTINUOUS CHANGE PROCESS

Should there be no change, no technical and economic progress would exist, either, not to mention that humanity would not be able to evolve; that is to say: humanity would not exist, as a matter of fact. The XXI-th century has been confronted with a series of changes, be them of an economic, political, social, cultural, technological nature, or of any other nature, that “give birth” to diverse phenomena and processes that, along the run, shall trigger the modification of economy, society, organization, management and of the human resource – the new worldwide tendencies. It is only based on being aware of the theoretical notions that refer to the change process, and, also based on being accustomed to the concrete elements from the economic, political and social reality, that we shall be able to apply the management of change, and this would result in benefits and advantages both at the macro-economic level, and at the micro-economic one, as well. From this point of view, Romania that is currently crssing an economic crisis, crisis to be actually a worldwide phenomenon,comes as a very good example. Not too much talk shall be made either with reference to the causes that resulted in the appearance of this global economic crisis, or with reference to the consequences of this one on our country since the subject of the present paper focuses on the managerial change. In other words, our interest goes to the way in which this crisis affects the organizations (the trading companies) from Romania.change, change process, change management, economic crisis

Chapter 7: Institutional Support

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

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

Building capacity in climate change policy analysis and negotiation: methods and technologies

Capacity building is often cited as the reason “we cannot just pour money into developing countries” and why so many development projects fail because their design does not address local conditions. It is therefore a key technical and political concept in international development. Some of the poorest countries in the world are also some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their vulnerability is in part due to a lack of capacity to plan and anticipate the effects of climate change on crops, water resources, urban electricity demand etc. What capacities do these countries lack to deal with climate change? How will they cope? What steps can they take to reduce their vulnerability? This innovative and high-profile research project was part of a larger project (called C3D) and conducted with non-governmental organisations in Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The research involved several participatory workshops and a questionnaire to all three research centres