Dashboards as business performans management software (BPMS)

Business performance management consists of a set of management and analytic processes, supported by technology, that enable businesses to define strategic goals and then measure and manage performance against those goals. Core business performance management processes include financial planning, operational planning, business modelling, consolidation and reporting, analysis, and monitoring of key performance indicators linked to strategy. Business performance management involves consolidation of data from various sources, querying, and analysis of the data, and putting the results into practice

USING QUERY-DRIVEN SIMULATIONS FOR QUERYING OUTCOMES OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

When decision makers want to know outcomes of business processes in their organizations, they often use simulations to do this. This paper describes how a new Query-Driven Simulation (QDS) approach can be used by decision makers to obtain information about future outcomes of business processes in a more declarative, flexible, and interactive way than the traditional approach of running simulations and then gathering statistics about simulation outcomes. The paper also describes the types of questions decision makers ask about outcomes of business processes and studies how easy it is to express these questions in terms of an SQL-like query language SimQL designed for Query-Driven Simulations. It also identifies the types of applications that are especially well-suited for QDS. Finally, the paper describes the Query-Driven Simulation Modeling Lifecycle and how QDS provides a feedback loop in the model development process.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

APQL: A process-model query language

As business process management technology matures, organisations acquire more and more business process models. The management of the resulting collections of process models poses real challenges. One of these challenges concerns model retrieval where support should be provided for the formulation and efficient execution of business process model queries. As queries based on only structural information cannot deal with all querying requirements in practice, there should be support for queries that require knowledge of process model semantics. In this paper we formally define a process model query language that is based on semantic relationships between tasks in process models and is independent of any particular process modelling notation

Inventing Less, Reusing More and Adding Intelligence to Business Process Modeling

Recently, a variety of workflow patterns has been proposed focusing on specific aspects like control flow, data flow, and resource assignments. Though these patterns are relevant for implementing Business Process Modeling (BPM) tools and for evaluating the expressiveness of BPM languages, they do not contribute to reduce redundant specifications of recurrent business functions when modeling business processes. Furthermore, contemporary BPM tools do not support process designers in defining, querying, and reusing activity patterns as building blocks for process modeling. Related to these problems this paper proposes a set of activity patterns, evidences their practical relevance, and introduces a BPM tool for the modeling of business processes based on the reuse of these activity patterns. Altogether our approach fosters reuse of business functions specifications and helps to improve the quality and comparability of business process models

An Ontological Framework for Context-Aware Collaborative Business Process Formulation

In cross-enterprise collaborative environment, we have dealt with challenges in business process integration for common business goals. Research directions in this domain range from business to business integration (B2Bi) to service-oriented augmentation. Ontologies are used in Business Process Management (BPM) to reduce the gap between the business world and information technology (IT), especially in the context of cross enterprise collaboration. For a dynamic collaboration, virtual enterprises need to establish collaborative processes with appropriate matching levels of tasks. However, the problem of solving the semantics mismatching is still not tackled or even harder in case of querying space between different enterprise profiles as considered as ontologies. This article presents a framework based on the ontological and context awareness during the task integration and matching in order to form collaborative processes in the manner of cross enterprise collaboration

Mediated data integration and transformation for web service-based software architectures

Service-oriented architecture using XML-based web services has been widely accepted by many organisations as the standard infrastructure to integrate heterogeneous and autonomous data sources. As a result, many Web service providers are built up on top of the data sources to share the data by supporting provided and required interfaces and methods of data access in a unified manner. In the context of data integration, problems arise when Web services are assembled to deliver an integrated view of data, adaptable to the specific needs of individual clients and providers. Traditional approaches of data integration and transformation are not suitable to automate the construction of connectors dedicated to connect selected Web services to render integrated and tailored views of data. We propose a declarative approach that addresses the oftenneglected data integration and adaptivity aspects of serviceoriented architecture