Mobile Business Processes

Today’s global markets demand global processes. Increasingly, these processes are not only distributed, but also contain mobile aspects. We discuss two challenges brought about by these mobile business processes: Firstly, the need to specify the distribution of processes across several sites, and secondly, the need to specify the dialog flows of the applications implementing those processes on mobile devices. To remedy the first challenge, we give an overview of the Process Landscaping method with its support for refining processes across multiple abstraction layers and associating their activities and objects with distinguished locations. Next, we present a Dialog Flow Notation and Dialog Control Framework for the specification and management of complex hypertext-based dialog flows. These tools allow developers to build user interfaces for mobile client devices with different input/output capabilities, which all access the same application logic on a central server

Adaptive use of task assignment models in team-based mobile business processes

Most mobile business processes are executed under uncertain and dynamic working environments. This makes the traditional centralized approach for the management of mobile tasks inappropriate to respond to the changes in working environment quickly as collecting the changing information from geographically distributed workforces in real time is expensive if not impossible. This raises the need of a distributed approach in the management of mobile tasks. This paper proposes a distributed architecture for team-based coordination support for mobile task management. In this architecture, tasks are managed via peer-to-peer style coordination between team members who have better understanding on the changing working environment than a centralised system. The novelty of the design of the architecture is explained by applying it to a real business process in the UK

Mobile Business Processes : Challenges, Opportunities and Effect

Smartphones and tablets have become an important part of people’s daily life and people have started to use them for work purposes as well. Mobile computing has location and time flexibility advantages that enterprise can utilize with care. The world of mobile technologies is fragmented. It can be a complex task for a non-mobile software company to decide what kind of smartphone application they want for their customers. People have different expectations on mobile applications and their usage habits differ. Mobile applications are more prone to disturbance because of their nature and again still performing critical tasks. They cannot be treated same as stationary computers in terms of business process support. This thesis presents an analysis of effects and opportunities brought by mobile devices to enterprises from small to large scale based on the literature survey. The thesis helps enterprises to understand what kind of approach to mobile support best suits their needs and how to handle the mobile-specific challenges in their IT systems

On the Value of Mobile Business Processes: Evidence from Sweden and the Netherlands

Identifying and assessing the benefits of mobile technology in a business context is often problematic. In this paper we start from the position that the benefits of mobile technology are hard to quantify in isolation, and that the unit of analysis to identify value should be the business process. An exploratory case study approach is used to identify the benefits of mobile technology at the level of the business process. We describe two cases from Sweden (vehicle dispatching and timber supply chain management) and one case from the Netherlands (mobile parking). We then illustrate how benefits of mobile technology are contingent to the difficulty of coordinating mobile actors. Next, the value of mobility is contingent to the costs of not being able to coordinate during the period that the actors are difficult to reach. Finally, we assert that it is also related to the costs of available substitutes for mobile technology in a business process.Mobile Technology; Information Systems; Technology Benefits; Exploratory Study; Business Processes

Aligning System Architectures on Requirements of Mobile Business Processes

The support of mobile workers with mobile IT solutions can create tremendous improvements in mobile business processes of a company. The main characteristic of such a mobile system is the ability to connect via a (mobile) network to a central server, e.g. in order to access customer data. This paper presents a detailed description of the four main software architectures for mobile client/server-based systems and their main characteristics. Beyond, typical business requirements in mobile environments like the location of use, data topicality, interaction requirements, synchronisation mechanisms and many more are mapped onto each of these architectures. The presented results can be used for discussing concurrent business needs as well as for deriving a mobile system architecture based on these needs

Suitability of Mobile Communication Techniques for the Business Processes of Intervention Forces

Intervention forces are special, often state-run organizations that are in charge of surveillance and intervention tasks. Examples are police, medical emergency services, civil defense, and security firms. From a business processes view, intervention forces are a subset of organizations whose operational business is mobile. The contribution analyzes the potentials and limits of mobile business processes for intervention forces. It proposes first approaches in the direction of a fully-integrated process chain for these organizations with regard to the special rules of mobile business.

The “Mobility-M”-framework for Application of Mobile Technology in Business Processes

In order to provide a structural framework for the application of mobile technology in business processes that can serve as a basis for understanding the organizational impacts of mobile technologies, we present a model, the „Mobility-M“. It puts the technology and the business processes in context with each other by using the theory of informational added values. The aim is to facilitate and visualize the use of mobile technologies according to their potential benefits and effects. This model and its graphical representation significantly enhance the orientation within the introduction of mobile business processes.

MAS platforms as an enabler of enterprise mobilisation: The state of the art

One of the main application areas for multi-agent systems technology is enterprise mobilization, wherein the main business process actors are nomadic workers. An agent's autonomy, sociality and intelligence are highly prized features when it comes to supporting those mobile workers who are geographically isolated from the main knowledge source (i.e. the corporate Intranet) and are frequently moving from one location to another. Based on experience gained from two field trials of applications (built using for multi-agent systems technology and running on lightweight handheld devices) that support mobile business processes for telecommunications service provisioning and maintenance, this paper proposes desirable metrics for any multi-agent systems platform intended for enterprise mobilisation use. These metrics are then used to compare a number of existing multi-agent systems platforms, and based on the results, this paper identifies some areas for improvement

Analysis of Mobile Business Processes for the Design of Mobile Information Systems

The adoption of mobile technologies into companies frequently follows a technology-driven approach without precise knowledge about the potential benefits that may be realised. Especially in larger organisations with complex business processes, a systematic procedure is required if a verifiable economic benefit is to be created by the use of mobile technologies. Therefore, the term “mobile business process”, as well as requirements for information systems applied in such processes, are defined in this paper. Subsequently, we introduce a procedure for the systematical analysis of the distributed structure of a business process model in order to identify mobile sub-processes. For that purpose, the method Mobile Process Landscaping is used to decompose a process model into different levels of detail. The method aims to manage the complexity and limit the process analysis to the potentially mobile sub-processes from the beginning. The result of the analysis can be used on the one hand as a foundation for the redesign of the business processes and on the other hand for the requirements engineering of mobile information systems. An application of this method is shown by the example of business processes in the insurance industry

Analysis and Optimization of Mobile Business Processes

Mobility of workers and business processes rapidly gains the attention of businesses and business analysts. A wide variety of definitions exists for mobile business processes. This work considers a type of business processes concerned with the maintenance of distributed technical equipment as, e.g., telecommunication networks, utility networks, or professional office gear. Executing the processes in question, workers travel to the location where the equipment is situated and perform tasks there. Depending on the type of activities to be performed, the workers need certain qualifications to fulfill their duty. Especially in network maintenance processes, activities are often not isolated but depend on the parallel or subsequent execution of other activities at other locations. Like every other economic activity, the out- lined mobile processes are under permanent pressure to be executed more efficiently. Since business process reengineering (BPR) projects are the common way to achieve process improvements, business analysts need methods to model and evaluate mobile business processes. Mobile processes challenge BPR projects in two ways: (i) the process at- tributes introduced by mobility (traveling, remote synchronization, etc.) complicate process modeling, and (ii) these attributes introduce process dynamics that prevent the straightforward prediction of BPR effects. This work solves these problems by developing a modeling method for mobile processes. The method allows for simulating mobile processes considering the mobility attributes while hiding the complexity of these attributes from the business analysts modeling the processes. Simulating business processes requires to assign activites to workers, which is called scheduling. The spatial distribution of activities relates scheduling to routing problems known from the logistics domain. To provide the simula- tor with scheduling capabilities the according Mobile Workforce Scheduling Problem with Multitask-Processes (MWSP-MP) is introduced and analyzed in-depth. A set of neighborhood operators was developed to allow for the application of heuristics and meta-heuristics to the problem. Furthermore, methods for generating start solutions of the MWSP-MP are introduced. The methods introduced throughout this work were validated with real-world data from a German utility. The contributions of this work are a reference model of mobile work, a business domain independent modeling method for mobile business processes, a simulation environment for such processes, and the introduction and analysis of the Mobile Workforce Scheduling Problem with Multitask-Processes