A BPM Lifecycle Plug-in for Modeling Methods Agility

Business Process Management literature has proposed several BPM lifecycles on a level of abstraction that is modeling method -agnostic, i.e. they consider the modeling language and tool support an underlying invariant or technological concern. While remaining on the same abstraction layer, we highlight a method agility requirement observed in commercial BPM consulting projects - concretely, it manifests as change requests for the modeling language or tool, from one lifecycle iteration to the next, leading to situations of model value co-creation as customer demands are assimilated in the modeling method. Based on a conceptualization of such situations, a lifecycle plug-in is proposed in the form of a methodology and associated tool support, allowing for responsive evolution of the adopted modeling method with impact on several lifecycle phases. Historical examples from the evolution of a BPM product are provided to illustrate and classify the demands that motivate the existence of this lifecycle plug-in

Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems

Providing an appropriate level of accessibility and traceability to data or process elements (so-called Items) in large volumes of data, often Cloud-resident, is an essential requirement in the Big Data era. Enterprise-wide data systems need to be designed from the outset to support usage of such Items across the spectrum of business use rather than from any specific application view. The design philosophy advocated in this paper is to drive the design process using a so-called description-driven approach which enriches models with meta-data and description and focuses the design process on Item re-use, thereby promoting traceability. Details are given of the description-driven design of big data systems at CERN, in health informatics and in business process management. Evidence is presented that the approach leads to design simplicity and consequent ease of management thanks to loose typing and the adoption of a unified approach to Item management and usage.Comment: 10 pages; 6 figures in Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT-BDCS 2015), Singapore July 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5764, arXiv:1402.575

Designing Reusable Systems that Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems : Revisiting Object-Oriented Principles

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure and 1 table. Accepted by the 9th Int Conf on the Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE'14). Lisbon, Portugal. April 201

A systematic literature review of the use of social media for business process management

In today’s expansion of new technologies, innovation is found necessary for organizations to be up to date with the latest management trends. Although organizations are increasingly using new technologies, opportunities still exist to achieve the nowadays essential omnichannel management strategy. More precisely, social media are opening a path for benefiting more from an organization’s process orientation. However, social media strategies are still an under-investigated field, especially when it comes to the research of social media use for the management and improvement of business processes or the internal way of working in organizations. By classifying a variety of articles, this study explores the evolution of social media implementation within the BPM discipline. We also provide avenues for future research and strategic implications for practitioners to use social media more comprehensively

Data in Business Process Models. A Preliminary Empirical Study

Traditional activity-centric process modeling languages treat data as simple black boxes acting as input or output for activities. Many alternate and emerging process modeling paradigms, such as case handling and artifact-centric process modeling, give data a more central role. This is achieved by introducing lifecycles and states for data objects, which is beneficial when modeling data-or knowledge-intensive processes. We assume that traditional activity-centric process modeling languages lack the capabilities to adequately capture the complexity of such processes. To verify this assumption we conducted an online interview among BPM experts. The results not only allow us to identify various profiles of persons modeling business processes, but also the problems that exist in contemporary modeling languages w.r.t. The modeling of business data. Overall, this preliminary empirical study confirms the necessity of data-awareness in process modeling notations in general

Requirements and Tools for Variability Management

Explicit and software-supported Business Process Management has become the core infrastructure of any medium and large organization that has a need to be efficient and effective. The number of processes of a single organization can be very high, furthermore, they might be very similar, be in need of momentary change, or evolve frequently. If the ad-hoc adaptation and customization of processes is currently the dominant way, it clearly is not the best. In fact, providing tools for supporting the explicit management of variation in processes (due to customization or evolution needs) has a profound impact on the overall life-cycle of processes in organizations. Additionally, with the increasing adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures, the infrastructure to support automatic reconfiguration and adaptation of business process is solid. In this paper, after defining variability in business process management, we consider the requirements for explicit variation handling for (service based) business process systems. eGovernment serves as an illustrative example of reuse. In this case study, all local municipalities need to implement the same general legal process while adapting it to the local business practices and IT infrastructure needs. Finally, an evaluation of existing tools for explicit variability management is provided with respect to the requirements identified.

Green BPM as a business-oriented discipline : a systematic mapping study and research agenda

Green Business Process Management (BPM) focuses on the ecological impact of business processes. This article provides a systematic mapping study of Green BPM literature to evaluate five attributes of the Green BPM research area: (1) scope, (2) disciplines, (3) accountability, (4) researchers and (5) quality control. The results allow developing a research agenda to enhance Green BPM as an approach for environmentally sustainable organizations. We rely on a dichotomy of knowledge production to present research directives relevant for both academics and practitioners in order to help close a rigor-relevance gap. The involvement of both communities is crucial for Green BPM to advance as an applied, business-oriented discipline

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V