A Data Flow Perspective for Business Process Integration

Business process integration has become prevalent as business is increasingly crossing organizational boundaries. While workflow technology is a standard solution for business process management, it is imperative for workflow management systems to provide effective and efficient support for collaboration. To address the issue of protecting organizations’ competitive knowledge and private information while also enabling business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, past research has focused on customized public and private process design and structure correctness of the integrated workflow. However, data flow is important for business process integration because data is always sensitive when conducting inter-organizational business and data errors could still happen even given syntactically correct activity dependence. This paper presents a data flow perspective. It gives an approach to define a “public data set” for each involved organization exemplifying the integrated workflow that is needed in order to be free from data anomalies e.g., missing data and redundant data errors

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