A Two-tier Data-centric Framework for Flexible Business Process Management

Business process management provides a means of coordinating interactions between workers and organizations in a structured way. However, the dynamic nature of the modern business environment requires these processes are subject to an increasingly wide range of variations. Therefore, flexible approaches are needed to deal with these variations in order to maintain viable business. In this paper, we propose a two-tier data-centric framework to achieve process flexibility. Our approach is based on Business Entity, a new process modeling paradigm widely recognized in recent years. We design a process design business entity (PD entity) to include business process definitions as a part of its information, and process execution business entities (PE entities) provide the context for defining the behavior of activities in the processes. The business processes, as the PD entity data, can be modified on-the-fly and evolve naturally as the PD entity progresses through its lifecycle. We illustrate this framework with an example from the travel service industry. It shows that this framework is able to improve process flexibility, empower business users with capability of making timely process changes, and reduces the burden of managing process evolution

Major Features, Benefits, and Prerequisites for Intelligent Enterprise Managing System

The modern conditions of high-tech and highly competitive markets require the evolution of the enterprise automation systems. Such new, the post-ERP systems should meet the conditions for the provision of customer self-service and other counterparts, the dramatic decrease of the manual labour through automation, robotic application, integration with other systems and external contracting systems, multi-channel marketing and distribution, reduction of supply chains and other current trends. These systems should be built on the new IEM Automation Paradigm (Intelligent Enterprise Managing) and therefore belong to the IEM system class. As stated in the IEM paradigm article, a modern approach to solving the task of automation is based on the application of "best" solutions for each separate entity or business unit. In practice, however, this approach has resulted in a series of significant problems. The scale of the problems is increasing with the growth in transactional load, competitive pressures on the market, requirements for accelerate optimization, and business processes changes

Delivering ‘Effortless Experience’ Across Borders: Managing Internal Consistency in Professional Service Firms

This article explores how professional service firms manage across borders. When clients require consistent services delivered across multiple locations, especially across borders, then firms need to develop an organization that is sufficiently flexible to be able to support such consistent service delivery. Our discussion is illustrated by the globalization process of law firms. We argue that the globalization of large corporate law firms primarily takes place in terms of investments in the development of protocols, processes and practices that enhance internal consistency such that clients receive an ‘effortless experience’ of the service across multiple locations worldwide. Over the longer term the ability to deliver such effortless experience is dependent upon meaningful integration within and across the firm. Firms that achieve this are building a source of sustainable competitive advantage

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.

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition

Managing value creation in knowledge intensive business services organisations

Value creation is essential in the Knowledge Intensive Business Service (KIBS) industry, due to its problem-solving nature. KIBS organisations need to understand their internal value creation processes as well as the complexity in the environment in order to survive and thrive. This paper investigates how value creation is managed in KIBS organisation through a case study. It then goes on to adopt Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to propose an organisational design, namely the Value Integration Office (VIO). The VIO focuses on the 5 functions/systems defined by VSM in the meta-system and operation of an organisation in order to manage value creation. This design is implemented in a case study organisation with the aim to adopt a holistic view on value creation within the organisation as well as facilitate future planning function. The implementation and impact of the proposed organisational design are reported in this paper