Discovery and Analysis of Activity Pattern Cooccurrences in Business Process Models

Research on workflow activity patterns recently emerged in order to increase the reuse of recurring business functions (e.g., notification, approval, and decision). One important aspect is to identify pattern cooccurrences and to utilize respective information for creating modeling recommendations regarding the most suited activity patterns to be combined with an already used one. Activity patterns as well as their cooccurrences can be identified through the analysis of process models rather than event logs. Related to this problem, this paper proposes a method for discovering and analyzing activity pattern co-occurrences in business process models. Our results are used for developing a BPM tool which fosters the modeling of business processes based on the reuse of activity patterns. Our tool includes an inference engine whichconsiders the patterns co-occurrences to give design time recommendations for pattern usage

HOW TO INFORM THE POINT OF SINGLE CONTACT? – A BUSINESS PROCESS BASED APPROACH

The EU-Service-Directive will lead to big challenges for public administrations. The administrations have to offer a point of single contact supporting the customer. This point of single contacts needs an overview of the administrational processes to perform his task. As processes from different organizations and organizational units are relevant for the EU-Service-Directive they can only be captured by using a distributed approach. The contribution of this paper is to present a domain specific distributed modeling method which allows a fast, efficient, and consistent capturing of the information needed for the point of single contact.

Business Process Assessment and Evaluation in Public Administrations using Activity Based Costing

Public administrations in Germany currently face challenges of cost reduction and modernization. Furthermore, Pan-European directives foster process harmonization and introduction of IT-supported and optimized processes. Hereby activity-based costing can be a useful instrument for process assessment and evaluation. Especially through the introduction of New Public Management and double-entry accounting Public Administrations in Germany now get the opportunity to use cost-centered accounting mechanisms to assess process performance and evaluate their activities in a holistic concept. Process Modeling can be a useful instrument to help the public administrations to structure their activities and capture information about them and thereby create a basis for activity-based costing. Therefore, the aim of this article is combining the domain specific process modeling method PICTURE and concept of activity-based costing for supporting Public Administrations in process assessment and evaluation

Business Process Model-Based Evaluation of ICT Investments in Public Administrations

This paper presents an approach to asses ICT investments in public administrations. The public sector bears great potential for business process optimization through ICT. However, these possibilities remain largely unexploited since the effects of ICT on the processes are not clear to decisions makers. To asses this impact all processes of a public administration, the process landscape, have to be taken into account. The PICTURE modeling method has been proposed as a way to efficiently model the whole process landscape. Based on the knowledge captured with those process models, the impact of certain ICT functionalities on the processes can be analyzed. ICT investment decisions become more transparent towards the political leadership. This paper has two research objectives: First, an architecture for an automated evaluation of ICT investment decisions is introduced. Second, the practical feasibility of the architecture is shown based on an investment decision for a document management system

On the Support of Workflow Activity Patterns in Process Modeling Tools: Purpose and Requirements

Patterns increase the reuse of existing knowledge (e.g., design solutions, source code) within organizations and help to achieve consistency between applications. Patterns for process design have received considerable attention by both business analysts and researchers. Several pattern categories have been proposed including patterns for control and data flow, resources, process change, and exception handling. Workflow activity patterns, which can be used as building blocks for business process models (e.g., approval, task execution request), however, have not been explored in-depth so far. Related to this problem we have proposed a set of workflow activity patterns in the ProWAP project. Each activity pattern represents a recurrent business function as it can be frequently found in business processes. The completeness and existence of our activity patterns has been evaluated through an extensive analysis of real process models. In this paper we discuss how to implement activity patterns within a BPM tool. In particular, we describe major goals and requirements of the BPM tool we are currently developing and in which we apply workflow activity patterns. In this context, we also provide a discussion regarding the notion we use for representing activity patterns (BPMN 1.2 vs. UML 2.0)

Configuration of actors and roles in establishing ICT

Establishing technologies has brought mixed socio-economic impacts across nations and regions. Researchers have studied the relationships between the establishment technologies and its impacts through identifying innovative processes, major actors, and available resources. However, the challenge to this literature is how less resourced countries have achieved greater prosperity than better resourced countries by establishing Information and Communication Technology (ICT). To understand and analyze this phenomenon, we propose a typology of the configuration of roles and actors in establishing ICT based on an innovation framework. The proposed typology can be used not only to explain different socio-economic impacts among countries or regions, but also to suggest a constructive way in establishing ICT through reconfiguring involved actors in the key roles

Model-Supported Business Alignment of IT — Conceptual Foundations

Business Information Technology (IT) alignment focuses on the efficient support of business processes by IT. Therefore,existing software artifacts are addressed by business process models. When the processes change, however, there is a need toadjust the supporting software systems. Thus, already during the design phase of business process models, IT artifacts shouldto be considered. The instrument of conceptual modeling gains wide acceptance, especially in the health care sector todescribe and manage clinical processes, such as Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) and Clinical Pathways (CP). There are noholistic approaches so far that provide the alignment between these two concepts and ensure the quality of treatment and theconsistent adaptation of a Hospital Information System (HIS), in particular the hospital’s Workflow Management System(WfMS). To link business process models and the WfMS, the Description Kit Approach (DKA) is used to prepare conceptualmodels to make them automatically analyzable. It is suggested that at an early stage of the modeling process the use ofguidelines has an substantial benefit for avoiding integration conflicts in conceptual models. Furthermore, due to the way theapproach bridges the semantic gap, changes of business requirements as well as technical implementation restrictionsinfluence each other. This results in an ongoing system development process that can be interpreted as a permanentmanagement of application systems. Our results contribute to model-based management theories that have so far neglectedthe distributed construction of conceptual models