Correlating Business Process and Organizational Models to Manage Change

Business Process Management (BPM) provides the methods, tools and modelling notations to support a processcentric organizational view and management capability. As organizations grow in size and complexity, process improvement initiatives may involve change that has direct / significant impact across an organization. Thus, we provide methods and extensions to existing process modelling notations to analyse change against high- level models of the organization. Our approach permits improved analysis against higher-level organizational structures, motivations, inter-dependencies and capabilities that should be ideally considered as primary requirements during process design. Additionally, the organizational model becomes the ‘scaffolding’ with which to construct effective process architectures and management portfolios. This paper discusses our approach in the context of two modelling notations – the i* framework as an organizational modelling notation, and the BPMN notation for business process modelling

Auditing business process compliance

Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations.We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support

Combined Approach for Supporting the Business Process Model Lifecycle

Business processes evolve throughout their lifecycle of change. Business Process Modeling (BPM2) notations such as BPMN are used to effectively conceptualize and communicate important process characteristics to relevant stakeholders. Agent-oriented conceptual modeling notations, such as i*, effectively capture and communicate organizational context. In this paper we argue that the management of change throughout the business process model lifecycle can be more effectively supported by combining notations. In particular, we identify two potential sources of process change, one occurring within the organizational context and the other within the operational context. As such the focus in this paper is on the co-evolution of operational (BPMN) and organizational (i*) models. Our intent is to provide a way of expressing changes, which arise in one model, effectively in the other model. We present constrained development methodologies capable of guiding an analyst when reflecting changes from an i* model to a BPMN model and vice-versa

Combining i* and BPMN for business process model lifecycle management

The premise behind ‘third wave’ Business Process Management (BPM1) is effective support for change at levels. Business Process Modeling (BPM2) notations such as BPMN are used to effectively conceptualize and communicate process configurations to relevant stakeholders. In this paper we argue that the management of change throughout the business process model lifecycle requires greater conceptual support achieved via a combination of complementary notations. As such the focus in this paper is on the co-evolution of operational (BPMN) and organizational (i*) models. Our intent is to provide a way of expressing changes, which arise in one model, effectively in the other model. We present constrained development methodologies capable of guiding an analyst when reflecting changes from an i* model to a BPMN model and vice-versa. 1 Introductio

Verifying semantic business process models in inter-operation

Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts

Verifying semantic business process models in inter-operation

Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts

Relating business process models to goal-oriented requirements models in KAOS

Business Process Management (BPM) has many anticipated benefits including accelerated process improvement, at the operational level, with the use of highly configurable and adaptive “process aware” information systems [1] [2]. The facility for improved agility fosters the need for continual measurement and control of business processes to assess and manage their effective evolution, in-line with organizational objectives. This paper proposes the GoalBPM methodology for relating business process models (modeled using BPMN) to high-level stakeholder goals (modeled using KAOS). We propose informal (manual) techniques (with likely future formalism) for establishing and verifying this relationship, even in dynamic environments where essential alterations to organizational goals and/or process constantly emerge

Model Eco-Systems: Preliminary Work

Modeling is core software engineering practice. Conceptual models are constructed to establish an abstract understanding of the domain among stakeholders. These are then refined into computational models that aim to realize a conceptual specification. The refinement process yields sets of models that are initially incomplete and inconsistent by nature. The aim of the engineering process is to negotiate consistency and completeness toward a stable state sufficient for deployment / implementation. This paper presents the notion of a model ecosystem, which permits the capability to guide analyst edits toward stability by computing consistency and completeness equilibria for conceptual models during periods of model change

Process discovery from model and text artefacts

Modeling is an important and time consuming part of the Business Process Management life-cycle. An analyst reviews existing documentation and queries relevant domain experts to construct both mental and concrete models of the domain. To aid this exercise, we propose the Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD) framework and prototype tool that can query heterogeneous information resources (e.g. corporate documentation, web-content, code e.t.c.) and rapidly construct proto-models to be incrementally adjusted to correctness by an analyst. This constitutes a departure from building and constructing models toward just editing them. We believe this rapid mixed-initiative modeling will increase analyst productivity by significant orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. Furthermore, the possibility of using the approach in distributed and real-time settings seems appealing and may help in significantly improving the quality of the models being developed w.r.t. being consistent, complete, and concise

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Complex business networks such as supply chains, with cross-organizational workflows of even greater complexity, are becoming increasingly common. The problem of engineering cross-organizational processes in a manner that accounts for inter-organizational constraints, and dynamics, has received little attention in the literature. This paper describes an effective framework for addressing the problem. The actor eco-systems approach leverages the ecosystems metaphor to model cross-enterprise constraints, change propagation and equilibria. It describes how cross-enterprise processes can be derived from such models and maintained in the face of dynamic business contexts