Current and Future Issues in BPM Research: A European Perspective from the ERCIS Meeting 2010

Business process management (BPM) is a still-emerging field in the academic discipline of Information Systems (IS). This article reflects on a workshop on current and future issues in BPM research that was conducted by seventeen IS researchers from eight European countries as part of the 2010 annual meeting of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The results of this workshop suggest that BPM research can meaningfully contribute to investigating a broad variety of phenomena that are of interest to IS scholars, ranging from rather technical (e.g., the implementation of software architectures) to managerial (e.g., the impact of organizational culture on process performance). It further becomes noticeable that BPM researchers can make use of several research strategies, including qualitative, quantitative, and design-oriented approaches. The article offers the participants’ outlook on the future of BPM research and combines their opinions with research results from the academic literature on BPM, with the goal of contributing to establishing BPM as a distinct field of research in the IS discipline

Ontological representation and governance of business semantics in compliant service networks

The Internet would enable new ways for service innovation and trading, as well as for analysing the resulting value networks, with an unprecedented level of scale and dynamics. Yet most related economic activities remain of a largely brittle and manual nature. Service-oriented business implementations focus on operational aspects at the cost of value creation aspects such as quality and regulatory compliance. Indeed they enforce how to carry out a certain business in a prefixed non-adaptive manner rather than capturing the semantics of a business domain in a way that would enable service systems to adapt their role in changing value propositions. In this paper we set requirements for SDL-compliant business service semantics, and propose a method for their ontological representation and governance. We demonstrate an implementation of our approach in the context of service-oriented Information Governance

Towards ontology based BPMN Implementation.

International audienceNatural language is understandable by human and not machine. None technical persons can only use natural language to specify their business requirements. However, the current version of Business process management and notation (BPMN) tools do not allow business analysts to implement their business processes without having technical skills. BPMN tool is a tool that allows users to design and implement the business processes by connecting different business tasks and rules together. The tools do not provide automatic implementation of business tasks from users' specifications in natural language (NL). Therefore, this research aims to propose a framework to automatically implement the business processes that are expressed in NL requirements. Ontology is used as a mechanism to solve this problem by comparing between users' requirements and web services' descriptions. Web service is a software module that performs a specific task and ontology is a concept that defines the relationships between different terms

Conceptual modeling for the design of intelligent and emergent information systems

A key requirement to today's fast changing economic environment is the ability of organizations to adapt dynamically in an effective and efficient manner. Information and Communication Technologies play a crucially important role in addressing such adaptation requirements. The notion of `intelligent software' has emerged as a means by which enterprises can respond to changes in a reactive manner but also to explore, in a pro-active manner, possibilities for new business models. The development of such software systems demands analysis, design and implementation paradigms that recognize the need for ‘co-development’ of these systems with enterprise goals, processes and capabilities. The work presented in this paper is motivated by this need and to this end it proposes a paradigm that recognizes co-development as a knowledge-based activity. The proposed solution is based on a multi-perspective modeling approach that involves (i) modeling key aspects of the enterprise, (ii) reasoning about design choices and (iii) supporting strategic decision-making through simulations. The utility of the approach is demonstrated though a case study in the field of marketing for a start-up company

Declarative techniques for modeling and mining business processes..

Organisaties worden vandaag de dag geconfronteerd met een schijnbare tegenstelling. Hoewel ze aan de ene kant veel geld geïnvesteerd hebben in informatiesystemen die hun bedrijfsprocessen automatiseren, lijken ze hierdoor minder in staat om een goed inzicht te krijgen in het verloop van deze processen. Een gebrekkig inzicht in de bedrijfsprocessen bedreigt hun flexibiliteit en conformiteit. Flexibiliteit is belangrijk, omdat organisaties door continu wijzigende marktomstandigheden gedwongen worden hun bedrijfsprocessen snel en soepel aan te passen. Daarnaast moeten organisaties ook kunnen garanderen dan hun bedrijfsvoering conform is aan de wetten, richtlijnen, en normen die hun opgelegd worden. Schandalen zoals de recent aan het licht gekomen fraude bij de Franse bank Société Générale toont het belang aan van conformiteit en flexibiliteit. Door het afleveren van valse bewijsstukken en het omzeilen van vaste controlemomenten, kon één effectenhandelaar een risicoloze arbitragehandel op prijsverschillen in futures omtoveren tot een risicovolle, speculatieve handel in deze financiële derivaten. De niet-ingedekte, niet-geautoriseerde posities bleven lange tijd verborgen door een gebrekkige interne controle, en tekortkomingen in de IT beveiliging en toegangscontrole. Om deze fraude in de toekomst te voorkomen, is het in de eerste plaats noodzakelijk om inzicht te verkrijgen in de operationele processen van de bank en de hieraan gerelateerde controleprocessen. In deze tekst behandelen we twee benaderingen die gebruikt kunnen worden om het inzicht in de bedrijfsprocessen te verhogen: procesmodellering en procesontginning. In het onderzoek is getracht technieken te ontwikkelen voor procesmodellering en procesontginning die declaratief zijn. Procesmodellering process modeling is de manuele constructie van een formeel model dat een relevant aspect van een bedrijfsproces beschrijft op basis van informatie die grotendeels verworven is uit interviews. Procesmodellen moeten adequate informatie te verschaffen over de bedrijfsprocessen om zinvol te kunnen worden gebruikt bij hun ontwerp, implementatie, uitvoering, en analyse. De uitdaging bestaat erin om nieuwe talen voor procesmodellering te ontwikkelen die adequate informatie verschaffen om deze doelstelling realiseren. Declaratieve procestalen maken de informatie omtrent bedrijfsbekommernissen expliciet. We karakteriseren en motiveren declaratieve procestalen, en nemen we een aantal bestaande technieken onder de loep. Voorts introduceren we een veralgemenend raamwerk voor declaratieve procesmodellering waarbinnen bestaande procestalen gepositioneerd kunnen worden. Dit raamwerk heet het EM-BrA�CE raamwerk, en staat voor `Enterprise Modeling using Business Rules, Agents, Activities, Concepts and Events'. Het bestaat uit een formele ontolgie en een formeel uitvoeringsmodel. Dit raamwerk legt de ontologische basis voor de talen en technieken die verder in het doctoraat ontwikkeld worden. Procesontginning process mining is de automatische constructie van een procesmodel op basis van de zogenaamde event logs uit informatiesystemen. Vandaag de dag worden heel wat processen door informatiesystemen in event logs geregistreerd. In event logs vindt men in chronologische volgorde terug wie, wanneer, welke activiteit verricht heeft. De analyse van event logs kan een accuraat beeld opleveren van wat er zich in werkelijkheid afspeelt binnen een organisatie. Om bruikbaar te zijn, moeten de ontgonnen procesmodellen voldoen aan criteria zoals accuraatheid, verstaanbaarheid, en justifieerbaarheid. Bestaande technieken voor procesontginning focussen vooral op het eerste criterium: accuraatheid. Declaratieve technieken voor procesontginning richten zich ook op de verstaanbaarheid en justifieerbaarheid van de ontgonnen modellen. Declaratieve technieken voor procesontginning zijn meer verstaanbaar omdat ze pogen procesmodellen voor te stellen aan de hand van declaratieve voorstellingsvormen. Daarenboven verhogen declaratieve technieken de justifieerbaarheid van de ontgonnen modellen. Dit komt omdat deze technieken toelaten de apriori kennis, inductieve bias, en taal bias van een leeralgoritme in te stellen. Inductief logisch programmeren (ILP) is een leertechniek die inherent declaratief is. In de tekst tonen we hoe proces mining voorgesteld kan worden als een ILP classificatieprobleem, dat de logische voorwaarden leert waaronder gebeurtenis plaats vindt (positief event) of niet plaatsvindt (een negatief event). Vele event logs bevatten van nature geen negatieve events die aangeven dat een bepaalde activiteit niet kon plaatsvinden. Om aan dit probleem tegemoet te komen, beschrijven we een techniek om artificiële negatieve events te genereren, genaamd AGNEs (process discovery by Artificially Generated Negative Events). De generatie van artificiële negatieve events komt neer op een configureerbare inductieve bias. De AGNEs techniek is geïmplementeerd als een mining plugin in het ProM raamwerk. Door process discovery voor te stellen als een eerste-orde classificatieprobleem op event logs met artificiële negatieve events, kunnen de traditionele metrieken voor het kwantificeren van precisie (precision) en volledigheid (recall) toegepast worden voor het kwantificeren van de precisie en volledigheid van een procesmodel ten opzicht van een event log. In de tekst stellen we twee nieuwe metrieken voor. Deze nieuwe metrieken, in combinatie met bestaande metrieken, werden gebruikt voor een uitgebreide evaluatie van de AGNEs techniek voor process discovery in zowel een experimentele als een praktijkopstelling.

On Enabling Integrated Process Compliance with Semantic Constraints in Process Management Systems

Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment. To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks). In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well. Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework. The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes. Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS

Model-Driven Semantic Web Rule Engineering

The tutorial was given at the Conference Center of Fairmount Spring Hotel in Banff on the 10th of May, 2007 and the tutorial was scheduled for the main conference program. We approximately had 60 participants. The overall impressions of all participants were very positive about the quality of the tutorial and the information presented. Many participants stressed that they especially like how we combined three different areas (i.e., MDE, Semantic Web, and service-oriented architectures) in a very consistent and informative way, so that they were able to grasp a completely-new perspective on how these area could be combined and practically used. Our approach was especially appreciated by participants coming from industrial settings, who like the way we tried to combine novel and not widely adopted Semantic Web technologies with well-known software engineering techniques. However, our impression was that the next editions of the tutorial to be submitted to other conferences could slightly be updated, so that we can put less emphasis on the fundamental technologies (e.g., ontologies and metamodeling) and more focus on semantic service-oriented architectures and Web applications. This is due to the fact that tutorials should always have strong analysis on how some novel technologies can be transferred to industrial setting. Of course, this also depends on the conference where we are going to present the tutorial, since different research communities have different background knowledge, and thus they need more emphasis on different background knowledge, which decreases the time we can spend on advance applications. Moreover, even the audience from the same community does not have the same background knowledge and tutorial presenters should always make some trade-offs. Our plan is to revise the tutorial accordingly and submit it to other conferences such as International Semantic Web Conference and International Conference on Software Engineering. In addition to new tutorial editions, we also plan to write a paper that will be covering the tutorial subject. That paper will be submitted to an international journal such as ACM Computing Surveys and Knowledge Engineering Reviews or as a book chapter to an edited book. We hope that this paper will not only be a suitable lecture note, but it could be a relevant visionary paper for the future development of this area of integration of Semantic Web technologies into software development process. I am also happy to report that Dr. Marco Brambilla of Politecnico di Milano, who is a member of the well-known WebML research group and leading Web engineering company (WebRatio), expressed his wish to collaborate with us in the future tutorial editions and the work on the future papers covering the tutorial subject. On the grounds of the subject of this tutorial, I have already submitted a project proposal in collaboration with Prof. Marek Hatala and TELUS Communications for a NSERC strategic project grant in April 2007. This project proposal is also fully coordinated with the European consortia led by Prof. Gerd Wagner that also submitted a project proposal to EU commission for a grant within Framework Program 7. In addition, Dr. Brambilla is also very enthusiastic about setting up similar research collaboration in the future, and we made a plan on how to collaborate by trying to get involve our students to work on the subjects that are looking at the intersections of our research areas. At the conference, I had a contact with Mr. Ralf Gerstner of Springer who was the editor of the research monograph “Model-Driven Architecture and Ontology Development” where I was the led author. He invited me to write another book that will be covering the subject of this tutorial, as he was very positive about the high interest of the audience, rising importance of the subject and the feedback we got form the audience at the WWW2007. Our plan is that we should first proceed with the above-mentioned paper and also produce some more research experiments with the technology till the end of this year, and then prepare a book proposal in early 2008. My personal plan is to try to develop a new computer science course at Athabasca University that will cover the subject of this tutorial as well as to revise some of the existing ones (e.g., COMP 603 and COMP 610) that can benefit from the expertise in this area. I anticipate that the experience obtained at the WWW2007 conference will be used as a very good input for increasing the quality of that new course and potentially increase competitiveness of Athabasca University’s courses by offering challenging research subjects that are attracting a high attention of industry and which we explore collaboratively with world leading researchers. Thanks to the research reputation and presentation experience in the area covered in the tutorial, I am invited to give 3 technology lectures (2 hours altogether) at the 2nd Summer School on Generative Transformational Technologies in Software Engineering (GTTSE 2007) in Braga, Portugal from July 1st till July 7, 2007. Given that this event attracts the most renowned researchers giving talks (which will be excellent opportunity to share research experience, disseminate our research results, and collaborate with well-known researchers) and encouraged with the positive experience from WWW2007, I plan to apply for another A&PDF award to support my attendance at GTTSE 2007.Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and the Semantic Web represent two key technologies with a far-reaching vision for the future of software engineering and Web engineering. the main promise of MDE is to raise the level of abstraction from technology-platform-specific concepts to the higher levels of platform-independence and "computation-independent" modeling. The Semantic Web vision starts from another perspective: sharing data, resources and knowledge between parties that belong to different organizations, different cultures and/or different communities. Ontologies and rule play the main role in the Semantic Web for publishing community vocabularies and policies, for annotating resources and for turning Web applications into inference-enabled collaboration platforms. Although these two technology visions have been developed by two different communities, they share number of principles and goals, and there are important synergies that can be achie3ved by combining them with each other. The ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) standard (http://ontology.omg.org) by the OMG can be viewed as a first step towards bridging MDE and the Semantic Web. Another important building block is domain-specific modeling languages suitable for describing specific domains. MDE provides a set of principles and techniques how to create domain-specific modeling languages by using metamodeling, how to transform from one type of modeling language to another, and how to change level of abstractions (e.g., from platform-specific to platform-independent and back). The most well-known initiatives in this areas are the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) by the OMG and the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The main goal of this tutorial is to give an introduction into state-of-the-art Web engineering methods based on the principles, models, and technologies of both MDE and the Semantic Web. The tutorial starts from the basics of the Semantic Web and MDE (e.g., ontology languages, modeling languages, mode transformations), and then explores how they can be employed in various states of Web engineering by addressing the following questions: 1) How can we develop ontologies and rules with MDE-based approaches and standards?, 2) How can we develop Semantic Web services that follow MDE recommendations?, 3) How we can build next generation Web applications that are taking advantage of both Semantic Web and MDE?Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF