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

An architecture for organisational decision support

The Decision Support (DS) topic of the Network Enabled Capability for Through Life Systems Engineering (NECTISE) project aims to provide organisational through-life decision support for the products and services that BAE Systems deliver. The topic consists of five streams that cover resource capability management, decision management, collaboration, change prediction and integration. A proposed architecture is presented for an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) that combines the streams to provide a structured approach to addressing a number of issues that have been identified by BAE Systems business units as being relevant to DS: uncertainty and risk, shared situational awareness, types of decision making, decision tempo, triggering of decisions, and support for autonomous decision making. The proposed architecture will identify how either individuals or groups of decision makers (including autonomous agents) would be utilised on the basis of their capability within the requirements of the scenario to collaboratively solve the decision problem. Features of the scenario such as time criticality, required experience level, the need for justification, and conflict management, will be addressed within the architecture to ensure that the most appropriate decision management support (system/naturalistic/hybrid) is provided. In addition to being reliant on a number of human factors issues, the decision making process is also reliant on a number of information issues: overload, consistency, completeness, uncertainty and evolution, which will be discussed within the context of the architecture

Valuing adaptation under rapid change

AbstractThe methods used to plan adaptation to climate change have been heavily influenced by scientific narratives of gradual change and economic narratives of marginal adjustments to that change. An investigation of the theoretical aspects of how the climate changes suggests that scientific narratives of climate change are socially constructed, biasing scientific narratives to descriptions of gradual as opposed rapid, non-linear change. Evidence of widespread step changes in recent climate records and in model projections of future climate is being overlooked because of this. Step-wise climate change has the potential to produce rapid increases in extreme events that can cross institutional, geographical and sectoral domains.Likewise, orthodox economics is not well suited to the deep uncertainty faced under climate change, requiring a multi-faceted approach to adaptation. The presence of tangible and intangible values range across five adaptation clusters: goods; services; capital assets and infrastructure; social assets and infrastructure; and natural assets and infrastructure. Standard economic methods have difficulty in giving adequate weight to the different types of values across these clusters. They also do not account well for the inter-connectedness of impacts and subsequent responses between agents in the economy. As a result, many highly-valued aspects of human and environmental capital are being overlooked.Recent extreme events are already pressuring areas of public policy, and national strategies for emergency response and disaster risk reduction are being developed as a consequence. However, the potential for an escalation of total damage costs due to rapid change requires a coordinated approach at the institutional level, involving all levels of government, the private sector and civil society.One of the largest risks of maladaptation is the potential for un-owned risks, as risks propagate across domains and responsibility for their management is poorly allocated between public and private interests, and between the roles of the individual and civil society. Economic strategies developed by the disaster community for disaster response and risk reduction provide a base to work from, but many gaps remain.We have developed a framework for valuing adaptation that has the following aspects: the valuation of impacts thus estimating values at risk, the evaluation of different adaptation options and strategies based on cost, and the valuation of benefits expressed as a combination of the benefits of avoided damages and a range of institutional values such as equity, justice, sustainability and profit.The choice of economic methods and tools used to assess adaptation depends largely on the ability to constrain uncertainty around problems (predictive uncertainty) and solutions (outcome uncertainty). Orthodox methods can be used where both are constrained, portfolio methodologies where problems are constrained and robust methodologies where solutions are constrained. Where both are unconstrained, process-based methods utilising innovation methods and adaptive management are most suitable. All methods should involve stakeholders where possible.Innovative processes methods that enable transformation will be required in some circumstances, to allow institutions, sectors and communities to prepare for anticipated major change.Please cite this report as: Jones, RN, Young, CK, Handmer, J, Keating, A, Mekala, GD, Sheehan, P 2013 Valuing adaptation under rapid change, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 192.The methods used to plan adaptation to climate change have been heavily influenced by scientific narratives of gradual change and economic narratives of marginal adjustments to that change. An investigation of the theoretical aspects of how the climate changes suggests that scientific narratives of climate change are socially constructed, biasing scientific narratives to descriptions of gradual as opposed rapid, non-linear change. Evidence of widespread step changes in recent climate records and in model projections of future climate is being overlooked because of this. Step-wise climate change has the potential to produce rapid increases in extreme events that can cross institutional, geographical and sectoral domains.Likewise, orthodox economics is not well suited to the deep uncertainty faced under climate change, requiring a multi-faceted approach to adaptation. The presence of tangible and intangible values range across five adaptation clusters: goods; services; capital assets and infrastructure; social assets and infrastructure; and natural assets and infrastructure. Standard economic methods have difficulty in giving adequate weight to the different types of values across these clusters. They also do not account well for the inter-connectedness of impacts and subsequent responses between agents in the economy. As a result, many highly-valued aspects of human and environmental capital are being overlooked.Recent extreme events are already pressuring areas of public policy, and national strategies for emergency response and disaster risk reduction are being developed as a consequence. However, the potential for an escalation of total damage costs due to rapid change requires a coordinated approach at the institutional level, involving all levels of government, the private sector and civil society.One of the largest risks of maladaptation is the potential for un-owned risks, as risks propagate across domains and responsibility for their management is poorly allocated between public and private interests, and between the roles of the individual and civil society. Economic strategies developed by the disaster community for disaster response and risk reduction provide a base to work from, but many gaps remain.We have developed a framework for valuing adaptation that has the following aspects: the valuation of impacts thus estimating values at risk, the evaluation of different adaptation options and strategies based on cost, and the valuation of benefits expressed as a combination of the benefits of avoided damages and a range of institutional values such as equity, justice, sustainability and profit.The choice of economic methods and tools used to assess adaptation depends largely on the ability to constrain uncertainty around problems (predictive uncertainty) and solutions (outcome uncertainty). Orthodox methods can be used where both are constrained, portfolio methodologies where problems are constrained and robust methodologies where solutions are constrained. Where both are unconstrained, process-based methods utilising innovation methods and adaptive management are most suitable. All methods should involve stakeholders where possible.Innovative processes methods that enable transformation will be required in some circumstances, to allow institutions, sectors and communities to prepare for anticipated major change

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

Characteristics of changeable systems across value chains

Engineering changes (ECs) are inevitable for businesses due to increasing innovation, shorter lifecycles, technology and process improvements and cost reduction initiatives. The ECs could propagate and cause further changes due to existing system dependencies, which can be challenging. Hence, change management (CM) is a relevant discipline, which aims to reduce the impact of changes. EC assessment methods form the basis of CM that support in assessing system dependencies and the impact of changes. However, there is limited understanding of which factors influence the change-ability across value chains (VCs). This research adopted a VC approach to EC assessment. Dependencies in products and processes were captured, followed by the risk (i.e. likelihood x impact) assessment of ECs using change prediction method (CPM). Four case studies were conducted from two industries (automotive, furniture) to identify design (product) and manufacturing (process) elements with high risk to be affected by ECs. Based on the case results, characteristics were identified that influence change-ability across VC. This contributed to the CM domain while businesses could also use the results to assess ECs across VC, and improve the design of products and processes by increasing their changeability across VC e.g. by proactive decoupling or reactive handling of system dependencies.Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), UK under Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI

A strategic planning methodology for aircraft redesign

Due to a progressive market shift to a customer-driven environment, the influence of engineering changes on the product's market success is becoming more prominent. This situation affects many long lead-time product industries including aircraft manufacturing. Derivative development has been the key strategy for many aircraft manufacturers to survive the competitive market and this trend is expected to continue in the future. Within this environment of design adaptation and variation, the main market advantages are often gained by the fastest aircraft manufacturers to develop and produce their range of market offerings without any costly mistakes. This realization creates an emphasis on the efficiency of the redesign process, particularly on the handling of engineering changes. However, most activities involved in the redesign process are supported either inefficiently or not at all by the current design methods and tools, primarily because they have been mostly developed to improve original product development. In view of this, the main goal of this research is to propose an aircraft redesign methodology that will act as a decision-making aid for aircraft designers in the change implementation planning of derivative developments. The proposed method, known as Strategic Planning of Engineering Changes (SPEC), combines the key elements of the product redesign planning and change management processes. Its application is aimed at reducing the redesign risks of derivative aircraft development, improving the detection of possible change effects propagation, increasing the efficiency of the change implementation planning and also reducing the costs and the time delays due to the redesign process. To address these challenges, four research areas have been identified: baseline assessment, change propagation prediction, change impact analysis and change implementation planning. Based on the established requirements for the redesign planning process, several methods and tools that are identified within these research areas have been abstracted and adapted into the proposed SPEC method to meet the research goals. The proposed SPEC method is shown to be promising in improving the overall efficiency of the derivative aircraft planning process through two notional aircraft system redesign case studies that are presented in this study.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Prof. Dimitri Mavris; Committee Member: Dr. Elena Garcia; Committee Member: Dr. Neil Weston; Committee Member: Mathias Emeneth; Committee Member: Prof. Daniel P. Schrag