Documentation of Flexible Business Processes - A Healthcare Case Study

In many industries, such as manufacturing and logistics, semi-formal process models have become a common means to reason and communicate about business processes. However, in a dynamic and flexible environment the suitability of semiformal process models as an instrument of process documentation may be challenged. Hospital processes are typical examples of business processes that are characterized by both the existence of well-defined procedures and the need for operational flexibility. This research investigates the current practice of process documentation in healthcare by means of a case study in a German hospital. We aim at getting an understanding of how flexible processes may be documented to give medical staff effective guidance and how this documentation has to be managed in order to provide value in everyday routine. On the basis of our findings we give suggestions on how to effectively implement process documentations in similar settings

Toward Process Modeling in Creative Domains

Process modeling has emerged as a widely accepted approach in order to reduce organizational complexity in organizations. Process models are used for different purposes, including process analysis and redesign, risk management, and the implementation of software systems. However, the majority of existent approaches is restricted to processes that are wellstructured and predictable. Highly creative environments, such as the film industry or R&D departments, however, are characterized by high levels of flexibility. As existent approaches do not provide ample means to model such processes, this paper discusses the capabilities that a conceptual process modeling grammar for processes in creative environments must provide. Furthermore, we suggest an approach to process analysis that aims at the identification and specification of creativity in business processes. The study belongs to the design science paradigm; the discussion is grounded in a theory that explains the nature of processes that rely on creativity

Towards Connecting Online Interfacing and Internal Core Business Processes

Nowadays, organisations tend to do more business online by enabling their business processes to interact with customers, suppliers, etc., via different online channels. On the other hand, their core business processes, such as production, engineering, etc., may still stay inside the organisation. As a consequence, this makes an organisation rely on the collaboration between these two types of business processes to conduct its business, and this collaboration brings issues like multiple instance correlation, process view, and process evolution, to the business process management (BPM) of the organisation. This paper reports our research in progress on these issues. It firstly identifies the requirements to fully support such collaboration, and then presents a framework to illustrate how the collaboration can be facilitated using latest BPM technologies. This framework provides a reference architecture to incorporating online interfacing and internal core business processes

How German hospitals govern IT - An empirical exploration

Health care services in German hospitals are causing immense expenses. Successful IT Governance might help to support specific challenges for every organization with an adequate use of IT. The market structure of hospitals in Germany is very heterogeneous, e.g. in size and sponsorship. This paper analyses the state of the art of IT Governance based on a survey among 220 IT executives in German hospitals. The quantitative analyses of collected survey data reveal that hospitals govern their IT differently according to size and sponsorship. In addition, our analyses show that decision-making authority for the IT budget rises with hospital size and is positively correlated with the fraction of IT projects in the overall IT budget. We also show that the investments in innovative IT projects increase with hospital size. Our study revealed that a high number of private and larger hospitals lack a systematic IT Governance approach within the decision domain on IT projects. This study is the first to shed light into the empirical situation of IT Governance in German hospitals. Creativity-intensive processes such as the development of marketing campaigns or the production of visual effects increasingly find their way into the agenda of process managers. Such processes often comprise of both well-structured, transactional parts and creative parts that often cannot be specified in terms of their process flow, required resources, and outcome. Moreover, the processes’ high variability sets boundaries for the possible degree of automation. In this paper we introduce the concept of pockets of creativity as an analytic device which is hoped to support process managers in their efforts to identify and describe creative sections in business processes. We argue that this step of identifying and describing is imperative to successfully allocate resources, integrate creativity into the overall process, and introduce process automation for those parts that are well-structured and can actually be automated. Our argument rests in the examination of existent literature as well as in findings from exploratory case studies that were conducted in the film and visual effects industry in order to study processes that rely on creativity

Social Protocols for Agile Virtual Teams, in

Abstract. Despite many works on collaborative networked organizations (CNOs), CSCW, groupware, workflow systems and social networks, computer support for virtual teams is still insufficient, especially support for agility, i.e. the capability of virtual team members to rapidly and cost efficiently adapt the way they interact to changes. In this paper, requirements for computer support for agile virtual teams are presented. Next, an extension of the concept of social protocol is proposed as a novel model supporting agile interactions within virtual teams. The extended concept of social protocol consists of an extended social network and a workflow model

A Dynamic Workflow Management System for Coordination of Cooperative Activities

This paper comes back to the problem of coordination of cooperative activities with a Workflow management system. First, we describe the differences that we have noted between business processes and cooperative processes. Then we present a set of requirements for a Workflow management system that aims to support cooperative workflow, and among these requirements are high flexibility and dynamicity. Then we describe how this has been taken into account in the development of the Bonita workflow management system that proposes to remove the idea of process model to work only with process instances that can be derived from each others or that can be composed

Integration and verification of semantic constraints in adaptive process management systems

Adaptivity in process management systems is key to their successful applicability in practice. Approaches have been already developed to ensure system correctness after arbitrary process changes at the syntactical level (e.g., avoiding inconsistencies such as deadlocks or missing input parameters after a process change). However, errors may be still caused at the semantical level (e.g., violation of business rules). Therefore, the integration and verification of domain knowledge will flag a milestone in the development of adaptive process management technology. In this paper, we introduce a framework for defining semantic constraints over processes in such a way that they can express real-world domain knowledge on the one hand and are still manageable concerning the effort for maintenance and semantic process verification on the other hand. This can be used to detect semantic conflicts (e.g., drug incompatibilities) when modeling process templates, applying ad hoc changes at process instance level, and propagating process template modifications to already running process instances, even if they have been already individually modified themselves; i.e., we present techniques to ensure semantic correctness for single and concurrent changes which are, in addition, minimal regarding the set of semantic constraints to be checked. Together with further optimizations of the semantic checks based on certain process meta model properties this allows for efficiently verifying processes. Altogether, the framework presented in this paper provides the basis for process management systems which are adaptive and semantic-aware at the same time