IUPC: Identification and Unification of Process Constraints

Business Process Compliance (BPC) has gained significant momentum in research and practice during the last years. Although many approaches address BPC, they mostly assume the existence of some kind of unified base of process constraints and focus on their verification over the business processes. However, it remains unclear how such an inte- grated process constraint base can be built up, even though this con- stitutes the essential prerequisite for all further compliance checks. In addition, the heterogeneity of process constraints has been neglected so far. Without identification and separation of process constraints from domain rules as well as unification of process constraints, the success- ful IT support of BPC will not be possible. In this technical report we introduce a unified representation framework that enables the identifica- tion of process constraints from domain rules and their later unification within a process constraint base. Separating process constraints from domain rules can lead to significant reduction of compliance checking effort. Unification enables consistency checks and optimizations as well as maintenance and evolution of the constraint base on the other side.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, technical repor

Boosting the Immunization Workforce: Lessons from the Merck Vaccine Network - Africa

This report shares lessons learned from The Merck Company Foundation's decade of experience building immunization capacity in Africa. The Merck Vaccine Network -- Africa, a philanthropic initiative to train immunization managers in Kenya, Mali, Uganda, and Zambia, suggests seven key lessons that can help other funders, governments, and NGOs designing or implementing similar vaccine delivery training programs improve the effectiveness and sustainability of their work.Merck's experience designing and supporting the initiative can offer valuable lessons for other actors in the immunization and broader global health fields who are engaged in or planning similar work. Specifically, we identify seven forward-looking lessons that can increase the effectiveness and sustainability of programs to build the capacity of the vaccine workforce in developing countries:Conduct a rigorous needs assessment to anchor efforts in local needs and priorities;Perform ongoing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to enable programs to adapt, improve, and generate evidence of impact to attract new partners and funding;Create a sustainability plan at the outset to ensure that program impact is maintained beyond the conclusion of initial funding;Embed programs into local health systems to ensure that investments leverage existing infrastructure, relationships, and resources, and that impact can be sustained beyond the life of the program;Employ locally-adapted curricula and appropriate teaching techniques to maximize transfer and retention of relevant knowledge;Incorporate supportive supervision into programs to ensure that transferred knowledge is maintained and acted upon;Facilitate and support regular convening and communication, enabling continuous learning for improvement.In addition to describing the approach taken by MVN-A and the results achieved in the four focus countries, this paper provides additional detail on each lesson, supported by case studies from the MVNA experience

Change Support in Process-Aware Information Systems - A Pattern-Based Analysis

In today's dynamic business world the economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Process-aware information systems (PAIS) offer promising perspectives in this respect and are increasingly employed for operationally supporting business processes. To provide effective business process support, flexible PAIS are needed which do not freeze existing business processes, but allow for loosely specified processes, which can be detailed during run-time. In addition, PAIS should enable authorized users to flexibly deviate from the predefined processes if required (e.g., by allowing them to dynamically add, delete, or move process activities) and to evolve business processes over time. At the same time PAIS must ensure consistency and robustness. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing change approaches have made it difficult for PAIS engineers to choose the adequate technology. In this paper we suggest a set of changes patterns and change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology with respect to process change support. Based on these change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected systems from both academia and industry. The identified change patterns and change support features facilitate the comparison of change support frameworks, and consequently will support PAIS engineers in selecting the right technology for realizing flexible PAIS. In addition, this work can be used as a reference for implementing more flexible PAIS

On the Modeling of Correct Service Flows with BPEL4WS

Frameworks for composing Web Services offer a promising approach for realizing enterprise-wide and cross-organizational business applications. With BPEL4WS a powerful composition language exists. BPEL implementations allow orchestrating complex, stateful interactions among Web Services in a process-oriented way. One important task in this context is to ensure that respective flow specifications can be correctly processed, i.e., there will be no bad surprises (e.g., deadlocks, invocation of service operations with missing input data) at runtime. In this paper we subdivide BPEL schemes into different classes and discuss to which extent instances of these classes can be analyzed for the absence of control flow errors and inconsistencies. Altogether our work shall contribute to a more systematic evolution of the BPEL standard instead of overloading it with too many features