Contextual Process Digitalization

This open access book presents an overview and step-by-step explanation of process management. It starts with the individual participants’ perspectives on their work in a process and its structuring and harmonization, and then moves on to its specification in a model and how it is embedded in the organizational and IT environment of the company. Lastly, the book examines the joint processing of instances in the resulting socio-technical systems. A corresponding illustration, which expands with the overview, enables readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of business process management. The book presents various facets of business process management from the perspective of the participants, and introduces a selection of models that have proved useful in practice. The design of such models supports the transition from a more-or-less unstructured or unsatisfactory way of working to a structured process that corresponds to the ideas of the company and its customers. The book is intended for professionals in industry as well as students in the field of business information systems who are looking for guidelines on how to discover, create and implement real-world processes

Efficacy-aware Business Process Modeling

In business process design, business objective models can fulfill the role of formal requirement definitions. Matching process models against objective models would, for instance, enable sound comparison of implementation alternatives. For that purpose, objective models should be available independently of their concrete implementation in a business process. This issue is not addressed by common business process management concepts yet. Moreover, process models are currently not sufficiently expressive to determine business process efficacy in the sense of fulfilling a business objective. Therefore, this paper develops and integrates constructs required for efficacy-aware process modeling and apt to extend common modeling approaches. The concept is illustrated with a sample scenario. Overall, it serves as an enabler for progressive applications like automated process optimization

Effort Estimation of Business Process Modeling through Clustering Techniques

A critical activity in project planning, especially in business process modeling (BPM) projects, is effort estimation. It involves several dimensions such as business domain complexity, team and technology characteristics, turning estimation into a difficult and inaccurate task. In order to reduce this difficulty, background knowledge about past projects is typically applied; however, it is too costly to be carried out manually. On the other hand, Data Mining enables the automatic extraction of new nontrivial and useful knowledge from existing data. This paper presents a new approach for BPM project effort estimation using data mining through clustering technique. This approach was successfully applied to real dat