Change and Compliance in Collaborative Processes

During their lifecycle, business processes are keen to change. Changes either concern the process model structure or the accompanying rules; e.g. compliance rules (laws and regulations). In the context of business process collaborations, several process partners collaborate together, and changing one process might result in knock-on effects on the other processes; i.e., change propagation. Since business processes are often subject to restrictions that stem from laws, regulations or guidelines; i.e., compliance rules, changing them might lead to the violations of these rules (non-compliability). So far, only the impacts of process changes in choreographies have been studied. In this work, we propose an approach that analyzes and evaluates the impacts of process changes on the different compliance rules and inversely, the impacts of compliance rule changes on the process choreography

Dealing with change in process choreographies: Design and implementation of propagation algorithms

Enabling process changes constitutes a major challenge for any process-aware information system. This not only holds for processes running within a single enterprise, but also for collaborative scenarios involving distributed and autonomous partners. In particular, if one partner adapts its private process, the change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Accordingly, it might have to be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge in this context is to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches are limited with respect to the change operations considered as well as their dependency on a particular process specification language. This paper presents a generic change propagation approach that is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree, i.e., the approach is independent of a specific process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. For all these change patterns, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve consistency and compatibility of the process choreography. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype of a change propagation framework for process choreographies is presented. Overall, comprehensive change support in process choreographies will foster the implementation and operational support of agile collaborative process scenarios

Tendências do BPM

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoAtualmente, as organizações encontram-se inseridas em ambientes de mercado cada vez mais competitivos, deparando-se com várias dificuldades, em que face a estas, necessitam de encontrar soluções. Por essa razão, viram o BPM como uma solução para melhorar o seu negócio. Um dos objetivos do BPM é ter a capacidade de identificar, monitorar e otimizar processos de negócio cujo resultado final é um conjunto de atividades realizadas. Com base nesta monitorização e otimização, as organizações tornam-se capazes de identificar possíveis lacunas nos seus processos e com isto melhorá-los. Com isto, verificou-se a falta de informação existente cientificamente em relação à identificação de novas tendências para o BPM. Neste sentido, com este trabalho propomos realizar uma investigação seguindo a metodologia de pesquisa em Design Science Research, em que iniciamos uma pesquisa de levantamento de tendência seguindo a abordagem proposta por Webster e Watson (2002), com base em duas conferências internacionais em BPM de ranking elevado, em que se identificou os tópicos mais abordados como também problemas e soluções desde 2013 até 2015. Posteriormente, com informação recolhida ao longo de três anos, através da criação de um framework identificamos algumas tendências para o BPM, de forma a melhorá-lo. Para garantir a credibilidade dos resultados, através da criação de um inquérito por questionário realizou-se a avaliação dos resultados obtidos.Nowadays, the market gets more and more competitive, thus companies need to learn how to manage and find the right solutions for their business when facing challenges. For that reason, they saw BPM as a great tool to expand their business. One of the features of BPM is the capacity to identify, monetize and optimize processes within the business which ultimately allow for an aggregation of performed activities. Thanks to these features, the business have been capable of identifying possible gaps in their processes and how to improve them. With this, it was verified the lack of scientific information regarding the identification of new trends for BPM. Therefore, with this work we propose to conduct an investigation that follows the searching methodology in Design Science Research, where we initiate a search of lifting trends as proposed by Webster and Watson (2002). This is based on two international conferences on BPM, in which it identified the most discussed topics and also the problems and solutions since 2013 until 2015. After this investigation, with collected information over 3 years, through the creation of framework we identify some BPM trends. To approve this results, we created a survey that was held an evaluation of the final results