BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

Impact of internal heating on the thermal evolution of neutron stars

The impact of various competing heating processes on the thermal evolution of neutron stars is investigated. We show that internal heating leads to significantly enhanced surface temperatures for pulsars of middle and old age. The heating due to thermal creep of pinned vortices and due to outward motion of proton vortices in the interior of the star leads to a better agreement with the observed data in the case of enhanced cooling. The strong pinning models are ruled out by a comparison with the cooling data on the old pulsars. For millisecond pulsars, the heating due to thermal creep of pinned vortices and chemical heating of the core have the largest impact on the surface temperatures. The angular dependence of the heating rates require two dimensional cooling simulations in general. Such a simulation is performed for a selected case in order to check the applicability of one-dimensional codes used in the past.Comment: 18 pages, to be published in A & A. Postscript and additional tables at http://www.physik.uni-muenchen.de/sektion/suessmann/astro/cool/schaab.109

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems: Challenges, Methods, Technologies

In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The attached pdf file gives a preview on Chapter 3 of the book which explains the book's overall structure

Process Change Patterns: Recent Research, Use Cases, Research Directions

In previous work, we introduced change patterns to foster a systematic comparison of process-aware information systems with respect to change support. This paper revisits change patterns and shows how our research activities have evolved. Further, it presents characteristic use cases and gives insights into current research directions

Optimized Time Management for Declarative Workflows

Declarative process models are increasingly used since they fit better with the nature of flexible process-aware information systems and the requirements of the stakeholders involved. When managing business processes, in addition, support for representing time and reasoning about it becomes crucial. Given a declarative process model, users may choose among different ways to execute it, i.e., there exist numerous possible enactment plans, each one presenting specific values for the given objective functions (e.g., overall completion time). This paper suggests a method for generating optimized enactment plans (e.g., plans minimizing overall completion time) from declarative process models with explicit temporal constraints. The latter covers a number of well-known workflow time patterns. The generated plans can be used for different purposes like providing personal schedules to users, facilitating early detection of critical situations, or predicting execution times for process activities. The proposed approach is applied to a range of test models of varying complexity. Although the optimization of process execution is a highly constrained problem, results indicate that our approach produces a satisfactory number of suitable solutions, i.e., solutions optimal in many cases

Beyond the selfishness paradigm and "Organizational Citizenship": Work-related prosocial orientation and organizational democracy

Many economists and psychologists refuse the idea that behaviour could be based on any other motives than selfish and hedonistic ones, at least in the context of economy, mainly based on a methodological premise, not so often on empirical research. The corresponding image of man that is inherent in exchange theories and expectancy-value theories has had a strong influence on research over the last decades. Despite this, concepts like Organizational Citizenship or Corporate Identity are in search of potentials concerning voluntary work engagement. And in the 'civil society' practical campaigns are looking for voluntary workers who help compensate socially disintegrative effects of capitalism without adjectives (Vaclac Klaus) and give people back meaning in self-determined work. These are two very different things which are deeply linked though. In this article we address this difference, criticize the concepts like Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB), discuss concepts of prosocial work motivation and organizational democracy, and bind this all together in a conceptual alternative of mutualistic-prosocial work orientation. --

BPM News - Folge 1

"Prozessorientierung" und damit in Zusammenhang stehende Schlagworte und Trends dominieren in diesem Umfeld schon seit einigen Jahren die Fachpresse. Man könnte daher vermuten, dass der Markt für Softwarelösungen zur Realisierung prozessorientierter Informationssysteme regelrecht boomt. Dem ist aber (noch) nicht wirklich so. Ein Grund hierfür ist, dass die Realisierung prozessorientierter Informationssysteme zum einen ein Umdenken in den damit befassten Fachabteilungen erfordert, und dass zum andern die Erfassung und Modellierung der (Geschäfts-) Prozesse einen erheblichen Zeitaufwand und hohe Kosten verursacht. Ein weiterer Grund ist, dass auf dem Markt eine Vielzahl verschiedener Produkte und Technologien miteinander konkurrieren, die auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise versuchen, prozessorientierte IT-Lösungen zu realisieren