Deriving social relations among organizational units from process models

For companies to sustain competitive advantages, it is required to redesign and improve business processes continuously by monitoring and analyzing process enactment results. Furthermore, organizational structures must be redesigned according to the changes in business processes. However, there are few scientific approaches to redesigning organizational structures. This paper presents a method for deriving and analyzing organizational relations from process models using social network analysis. Process models contain information on who performs which processes or activities, along with the assignment of organizational units such as departments and roles to related activities. To derive social relations among organizational units from process models, three types of metrics are formally defined: transfer of work metrics, subcontracting metrics, and cooperation metrics. By applying these metrics, various relations among organizational units can be derived and analyzed, which can suggest how organizational structure must be redesigned. To verify the method, the proposed metrics are applied to standard process models of the semiconductor and electronic industry in Korea

Unraveling idea development in discourse trajectories

Conference Theme: The Future of LearningShort Paper Session: SP 6.7With the present paper we want to shed light onto an issue that is central within the knowledge building theory but only little studied – the development of ideas in collaborative learning discourse. Starting from the construction of a network of explicit and implicit relations between ideas, we apply a scientometric method to tackle the temporality of collaborative processes based on the structure of successive ideas. The resulting discourse trajectories are shown to give a holistic and also a detailed view on how knowledge advances when their interpretation is combined with a qualitative analysis of the content of the ideas and their relations. The weighted relevance of relations between ideas enables the identification of sub-topics in the discourse, important ideas, and influence or uptake events.postprintThe 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2012), Sydney, Australia, 2-6 July 2012. In ICLS 2012 Proceedings, 2012, v. 2, p. 162-16

Generating business process recommendations with a population-based meta-heuristic

In order to provide both guidance and flexibility to users during process execution, recommendation systems have been proposed. Existing recommendation systems mainly focus on offering recommendation according to the process optimization goals (time, cost…). In this paper we offer a new approach that primarily focuses on maximizing the flexibility during execution. This means that by following the recommendations, the user retains maximal flexibility to divert from them later on. This makes it possible to handle (possibly unknown) emerging constraints during execution. The main contribution of this paper is an algorithm that uses a declarative process model to generate a set of imperative process models that can be used to generate recommendations

More than jedug-jedug: dynamics of discontent with tourist activity in Prawirotaman, Yogyakarta

Residents of Kampung Prawirotaman, Yogyakarta, Indonesia respond differently to night-time tourist activity. This historic batik kampung was transformed into an international tourist destination, sowing resident discontent over traffic, anti-social behaviour and noise. Conflict with religious values also features in this dynamic. Observations and in-depth interviews with residents, artists, and hotel/café owners in Prawirotaman and surrounding Islamic kampungs differentiated two phases of touristification. From the 1980s through the 1990s, batik factories were turned into lodgings primarily serving backpackers, and global practices co-existed with traditional culture. Prawirotaman became known as Kampung Bule, a neighbourhood for foreign tourists, reflecting optimism that tourism would define its identity. Then three consecutive crises (the 1998 Asian monetary crisis, the 2002 Bali bombing, and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake) propelled Prawirotaman into the second touristification phase. Welcoming higher-end visitors brought rising prosperity, but residents became unhappy about the noise, traffic, and late-night drinking. This dynamic became more complex as residents of surrounding religious kampungs, Karangkajen and Jogokariyan, added their voices. Forming a mosque alliance, they instigated a massive crack-down on the sale of alcohol in restaurants and cafés during the New Year celebrations of 2018. This response to the impact of tourism in Prawirotaman suggests that the current level of discontent corresponds to the final stage of the ‘Irridex’ model in which the residents have become openly hostile toward tourism

Process and Data: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Companies increasingly adopt process management technology which offers promising perspectives for realizing flexible information systems. However, there still exist numerous process scenarios not adequately covered by contemporary information systems. One major reason for this deficiency is the insufficient understanding of the inherent relationships existing between business processes on one side and business data on the other. Consequently, these two perspectives are not well integrated in many existing process management systems. This paper emphasizes the need for both object- and process-awareness in future information systems, and illustrates it along several examples. Especially, the relation between these two fundamental perspectives will be discussed, and the role of business objects and data as drivers for both process modeling and process enactment be emphasized. In general, any business process support should consider object behavior as well as object interactions, and therefore be based on two levels of granularity. In addition, data-driven process execution and integrated user access to processes and data are needed. Besides giving insights into these fundamental characteristics, an advanced framework supporting them in an integrated manner will be presented and its application to real-world process scenarios be shown. Overall, a holistic and generic framework integrating processes, data, and users will contribute to overcome many of the limitations of existing process management technology

Data-Oriented Declarative Language for Optimizing Business Processes

There is a signifi cant number of declarative languages to describe business processes. They tend to be used when business processes need to be fl exible and adaptable, being not possible to use an imperative description. Declarative languages in business process have been traditionally used to describe the order of activities, specifi cally the order allowed or prohibited. Unfortunately, none of them is worried about a declarative description of exchanged data between the activities and how they can infl uence the model. In this paper, we analyse the data description capacity of a variety of declarative languages in business processes. Using this analysis, we have detected the necessity to include data exchanged aspects in the declarative descriptions. In order to solve the gap, we propose a Data-Oriented Optimization Declarative LanguagE, called DOODLE, which includes the process requirements referred to data description, and the possibility to include an optimization function about the process output data

Investigating Differences between Graphical and Textual Declarative Process Models

Declarative approaches to business process modeling are regarded as well suited for highly volatile environments, as they enable a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding declarative process models often impede their adoption. Particularly, a study revealed that aspects that are present in both imperative and declarative process modeling languages at a graphical level-while having different semantics-cause considerable troubles. In this work we investigate whether a notation that does not contain graphical lookalikes, i.e., a textual notation, can help to avoid this problem. Even though a textual representation does not suffer from lookalikes, in our empirical study it performed worse in terms of error rate, duration and mental effort, as the textual representation forces the reader to mentally merge the textual information. Likewise, subjects themselves expressed that the graphical representation is easier to understand

What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle

Clinical Processes - The Killer Application for Constraint-Based Process Interactions?

For more than a decade, the interest in aligning information systems in a process-oriented way has been increasing. To enable operational support for business processes, the latter are usually specified in an imperative way. The resulting process models, however, tend to be too rigid to meet the flexibility demands of the actors involved. Declarative process modeling languages, in turn, provide a promising alternative in scenarios in which a high level of flexibility is demanded. In the scientific literature, declarative languages have been used for modeling rather simple processes or synthetic examples. However, to the best of our knowledge, they have not been used to model complex, real-world scenarios that comprise constraints going beyond control-flow. In this paper, we propose the use of a declarative language for modeling a sophisticated healthcare process scenario from the real world. The scenario is subject to complex temporal constraints and entails the need for coordinating the constraint-based interactions among the processes related to a patient treatment process. As demonstrated in this work, the selected real process scenario can be suitably modeled through a declarative approach.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED