A Method for Systematic Adaptation and Synchronization of Healthcare Processes

International organizations, as the World Health Organization (WHO) and national governments are constantly defining (or modifying) new healthcare protocols and procedures. Those changes have a significant impact, on one side, on the organizational concerns of a great number of healthcare institutions and centers, and on the other side, on their health information systems that need to be adapted according to the new (or modified) procedures. Administrative workflows are commonly defined by a high level entity and they must then be applied on different institutions ruled by this high level entity. Those workflows must then be adapted to the particular circumstances of each institution, complying with the general regulations of the process established at the top level. This problem, called Hierarchical Adaptation Problem, also implies establishing the methods to evolve together the high level regulation. Such methods must maintain the consistency among the different levels by means of the propagation of the changes to all the different adaptations of the original workflow. To solve this problem, this work introduces the Hierarchical Adaptation Method. A method based on ontologies to define the rules that must be satisfied by a generic workflow to be considered adaptable to different application cases and the rules that must be satisfied by its adapted versions. Moreover, it provides the operations to facilitate both adaptation of administrative workflows and propagation of changes

Perceptions of MBA Students on Business Process Modeling as a Learning Tool: An Empirical Investigation

Based upon a survey of 95 MBA students in a Business Process Management (BPM) course at a university in New England, this study reports the perceptions of students concerning the efficacy of process modeling as a learning tool. Depending on their majors, students were classified as (a) Information Technology (IT) majors and (b) Business majors. The fifteen variables explored in the survey were classified into three categories: (a) Process Analysis issues, (b) Course related issues, and (c) Organizational issues. Statistically significant differences are found on the value of simulation exercises as perceived by MBA students on five dimensions: (1) Analyzing Business Process Performance, (2) Modeling Business Processes, (3) High-level Process Mapping, (4) Understanding BPM Concepts, and (5) Grasping Process Control Issues. Implications of these differences for designing graduate level BPM courses in colleges of business administration are discussed in the paper. Keyword

Challenges in Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is an ever researched area in the discipline of information systems. Though the terminology might change with the waves of fashion, how information systems can support the multiple dimensions of knowledge management is an underlying theme in many streams of research. This article examines literature on knowledge management in order to synthesize a number of key challenges, which emerge from a multidimensional and boundary-spanning view on knowledge management. Six interrelated issues attempt to explain some of the essential aspects of knowledge in the organizational context: these issues are (1) standardization of processes, structures, and systems, (2) contextualization, (3) invasiveness in natural ways of working, (4) strategic alignment, (5) intelligence, and (6) cultural environment

Design of a Workflow-Based Grid Framework

This paper aims to present the design of the Grid Collaborative Framework which has been proposed in one of our previous work. Grid infrastructure for resources sharing is somewhat stable with the wide acceptance of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF), but Grid framework for collaboration is far from desired. Current Grid Collaborative Frameworks (GCFs) are domain specific and lack of plan-supported capability. These limitations make them less useful and narrow in scope of application. Our grid collaborative framework aims to improve these limitations. With the theoretical foundation based on the activity theory, workflow languages, and designed on top of existing OGSA infrastructure, our proposed framework aims at accelerating the development of grid collaborative systems that consider work plans as central role

Teaching Business Process Management with Simulation in Graduate Business Programs: An Integrative Approach

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a graduate level Business Process Management (BPM) course with process modeling and simulation as its integral component, being offered at an accredited business university in the Northeastern U.S. Our approach is similar to that found in other Information Systems (IS) education papers, and can best be described as Design Science Research applied to pedagogical innovation. We use a survey of 95 graduate business students, classified as Information Technology (IT)-oriented and Business (non-IT)-oriented, to evaluate how the proposed artifact – the BPM course and its modeling and simulation components – supports student learning. The survey explores process analysis, course design, and process integration issues. Statistically significant differences between the two student groups on the value of modeling and simulation are found on five out of 15 survey items: analyzing process performance, creating process models, mapping process structure, understanding process concepts, and implementing process controls. The paper discusses implications of these differences for designing and delivering graduate BPM courses in colleges of business administration

Knowledge-based process management – an approach to handling adaptive workflow

In recent years, many organisations have found enterprise modelling, especially business process modelling, to be an effective tool for managing organisational change. The application of business processing modelling has brought benefits to many organisations, but the models developed tend to be used for reference during business operations and re-engineering activities; they rarely play an active role in supporting the day-to-day execution of the processes. While workflow management systems are widely used for the streamlined management of "administrative" business processes, current systems are unable to cope with the more dynamic situations encountered in ad-hoc and collaborative processes [1]. A system that supports complex and dynamically changing processes is required. There is increasing interest in making workflow systems more adaptive [8][20] and using knowledge-based techniques to provide more flexible process management support than is possible Published in Knowledge-based Systems, Vol 16, 2003, pp149-160 Page 2 using current workflow systems [4][21]. This paper describes the results of a collaborative project between Loughborough University and the University of Edinburgh. ICI and Unilever were industrial partners on the project, providing real business requirements in the application domain. The project investigated the use of ontologies, agents and knowledge based planning techniques to provide support for adaptive workflow or flexible workflow management, especially in the area of new product development within the chemical industries

Research in Business Process Management: A bibliometric analysis

It contains several growing subtopics such as process mining, process flexibility and process compliance. BPM is also highly relevant for numerous related fields, such as Business Intelligence, ERP systems or Knowledge Management. The growing number of publications and the variety of topics in BPM make it useful to apply bibliometric methods on this scientific field. With bibliometric methods, topical clusters, essential authors and the relationships between them can be discovered. In this work, the BibTechMon software from the Austrian Institute of Technology is utilized to perform the bibliometric analyses. As a novelty for the work with BibTechMon, data from Google Scholar is used as the basis of the analyses. The nature of Google Scholar data differs significantly from the data of other scientific databases. These differences lead to changes on how the bibliometric analyses can be performed. After these changes have been assessed, several bibliometric analyses in the BPM field and related fields are performed. As a result of these analyses, diverse topical clusters in BPM and its related fields could be discovered. Additionally, important authors for each cluster and for the BPM field as a whole were determined. In order to evaluate the results of the bibliometric analyses, I conducted an interview on BPM with Professor Reichert, who is an active researcher in the field. Subsequently, his statements are compared with the results of the bibliometric analyses and the match between the bibliometric analyses and his statements is assessed

Document Workflow Management

Upravljanje radnim tokom dokumenta je jedna od najvažnijih komponenti sustava za upravljanje dokumentima. Primjena ovakvih sustava u svakodnevnom poslovanju je u današnje vrijeme jako česta pojava. Ti sustavi automatiziraju procese u koje je uključeno rukovanje bilo kojom vrstom dokumenata. Google Apps Script jezik je lak za učenje, baziran na JavaScriptu. Izvršava se na Google Cloud usluzi i dostupan svima sa računom Google. U implementaciji je korišten spoj više različitih tehnologija(JDBC, Azure, MSSQL, Bootstrap). da bi se omogućuilo dobro korisničko iskustvo.Workflow management is one of the main components of document management software.These systems are very often used in everyday buissenes processes. These system automatize processes involved with any kind of document. Google Apps Script is script programming language. It's easy to learn, based on JavaScript. It executes on Google Cloud Service and it's available to anyone with Google Account. For implementation of document worfklow many different technologies where used (JDBC, Azure, MSSQL, Bootstrap) to provide good user expirience

Un système coopératif basé sur les transactions

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. nationale.National audienceLa conception ou la réalisation de tout projet un tant soit peu conséquent sous-entend l?implication d?un certain nombre de personnes, voire d?un certain nombre d?équipes ou d?entreprises. Outre le fait qu?ils travaillent tous sur le même projet, les différents acteurs coopèrent et collaborent. En effet la réalisation de tout projet n?est pas faite en une succession d?étapes menées par un seul acteur mais par une synergie d?acteurs coopérant à la réalisation d?un but commun. C?est le concept même d?ingénierie concourante. Celle-ci nécessite une coopération entre les différents acteurs et un échange des données produite par chacun d?entre eux. De plus en plus d?entreprises utilisant internet pour l?échange de données, les différents acteurs ne sont alors plus soumis à l?obligation de travailler dans un même lieu géographique. On parle alors d?entreprise virtuelle ou d?entreprise-projet si le travail en commun dure le temps d?un projet. Cependant, il ne suffit pas simplement d?échanger des données pour travailler ensemble, il faut aussi contrôler et gérer ces échanges. La collaboration impliquant une certaine concourance dans le travail de plusieurs acteurs, la production de différentes versions des documents échangés implique un contrôle des échanges. L?objectif de cet article est la description d?un système de coopération réellement distribué. La philosophie globale de notre système est la distribution du contrôle des échanges et l?accès aux données échangées de manière standard. Adoptant une approche transactionnelle pour la réalisation de notre système de coopération, nous avons formalisés notre système transactionnel coopératif et notre critère de correction distribué (DisCOO-sérialisabilité). Dans cet article, nous nous servons d?un exemple support pour illustrer notre propos et appliquer cette formalisation à un cas concret. Nous présentons le prototype DisCOO (réalisé en Java et Prolog au-dessus d?un ORB) mettant en oeuvre notre système

A Chemistry-Inspired Workflow Management System for a Decentralized Composite Service Execution

With the recent widespread adoption of service-oriented architecture, the dynamic composition of such services is now a crucial issue in the area of distributed computing. The coordination and execution of composite Web services are today typically conducted by heavyweight centralized workflow engines, leading to an increasing probability of processing and communication bottleneck and failures. In addition, centralization induces higher deployment costs, such as the computing infrastructure to support the workflow engine, which is not affordable for a large number of small businesses and end-users. Last but not least, central workflow engines leads to diverse inadequate consequences dealing with privacy or energy consumption. In a world where platforms are more and more dynamic and elastic as promised by cloud computing, decentralized and dynamic interaction schemes are required. Addressing the characteristics of such platforms, nature-inspired analogies recently regained attention to provide autonomous service coordination on top of dynamic large scale platforms. In this report, we propose a decentralized approach for the execution of composite Web services based on an unconventional programming paradigm that relies on the chemical metaphor. It provides a high-level execution model that allows executing composite services in a fully decentralized manner. Composed of services communicating through a persistent shared space containing control and data flows between services, our architecture allows to distribute the composition among nodes without the need for any centralized coordination. A proof of concept is given, through the deployment of a software prototype implementing these concepts, showing the viability of an autonomic vision of service composition.Suite à l'adoption grandissante des architectures orientées service, la composition dynamique de services est devenu un problème important de la construction de plates-formes de calcul distribué. La coordination et l'exécutiuon de Web Service composites sont aujourd'hui typiquement conduits par des moteurs de "workflows" (graphes de composition de services, formant un "service composite") centralisés, entrainant différents problèmes, et notamment une probabilité grandissante d'apparition d'échecs ou de goulots d'étranglement. Dans un monde où les plate-formes sont de plus en plus dynamiques (ou "élastiques", comme envisagé par les "clouds", de nouveaux mécanismes de coordination dynamiques sont requis. Dans ce contexte, des métaphores naturelles ont gagné une attention particulière récemment, car elles fournissent des abstractions pour la coordination autonome d'entités (commes les services.) Dans ce rapport, une approche décentralisée pour l'exécution de Web Services composites fondée sur la métaphore chimique, qui fournit un modèle d'exécution haut-niveau pour l'exécution décentralisée, est présentée. Dans cette architecture, les services communiquent à travers un espace virtuellement partagé persistant contenant l'information sur les flux de contrôle et de données, permettant une coordination décentralisée des services. Un prototype logiciel a été développé et expérimenté. Les résultats de ces expériences sont présentés à la fin de ce rapport