AN APPROACH FOR ANALYZING THE EFFECTS OF RISKS ON BUSINESS PROCESSES USING SEMANTIC ANNOTATIONS

The management of risks has gained a lot of attention in the last years. Among the current challenges in this domain are the integration of risk management in the strategic planning and performance management across business units and organizational structures, the assessment of a company’s risk bearing capacity, and the improvement of the methods of risk measurement. In order to support the elicitation of risks in business processes, measure their impact on a company’s return and provide reports for regulatory authorities, it can be reverted to technology-oriented knowledge management. In this context we propose an approach that uses semantically annotated models to represent the influence of risks on business activities based on the concepts provided by a risk knowledge base. By transferring the annotated model information to the knowledge base, inference rules can be applied to analyze the effects of risks on the business processes during subsequent capacity simulations. For a first evaluation the approach has been implemented using the ADOxx meta modeling platform, the Protégé ontology management toolkit and the Jess rule engine. Finally, the use of the implementation is shortly illustrated by reverting to a sample business process from the domain of banking

Supporting Knowledge Elicitation and Analysis for Business Process Improvement through a Modeling Tool

Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a high priority topic for modern enterprises. However, due to the distributed knowledge, conducting BPI projects has become challenging in times of inter-organizational business networks. For supporting the elicitation, analysis, and sharing of knowledge by practitioners, we describe how semi-formally described domain knowledge on BPI and knowledge on problem-solving techniques is transformed into an implementation-oriented representation in the form of a modeling tool. Thus, we revert to the FDMM formalism (Formalism for Describing ADOxx Meta Models and Models) that permits to bridge the gap between semi-formal meta models and those that are executable on the ADOxx meta modeling platform

CODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE IN BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS

In times of globalization, new technologies and high market transparency, companies search for ways to raise the efficiency of their business processes and achieve long-term customer relationships. Therefore enterprises are strongly devoted to business process improvement (BPI) initiatives. However, in times of globally spanning inter-organizational business processes, conducting BPI initiatives is particularly challenging du to the necessary diverse and distributed knowledge. Successful BPI projects require the participation of a variety of employees who are directly involved in a business process. The employees have tacit process knowledge that needs to be transformed into explicit knowledge to derive improvement opportunities in a BPI project. To reach this, a set of easy to understand and well-structured BPI techniqus is required to encourage employees to participate in corresponding initiatives. Further, the codification of the results gained in such initiatives is decisive to enable their proper documentation, communication and processing. \ \ The paper at hand introduces a BPI roadmap for coordinating the structured use of BPI techniqus in a project. The roadmap is based upon a set of formal conceptual model types for codifying the results generated by each techniqu. In addition, reports are specified that process the model information and facilitate the communication and documentation of the results. The presented approach thus contributes to the systematic transformation of employees´ tacit process knowledge to explicit knowledge in the course of BPI initiatives. By applying the roadmap in a use case, its benefits for BPI initiatives are illustrated.

Trends in Academic and Industrial Research on Business Process Management - A Computational Literature Analysis

An important aspect of enterprise information systems is the management and execution of business processes. For exploring the evolution of topics in business process management in academia and industry, we present the findings from a computational literature analysis. For this purpose, we revert to the full texts and metadata of the proceedings of the International Conference on Business Process Management and its workshops as a sample. In addition, the data has been enriched with data on the academic or industrial provenance of the authors. For identifying the most important topics in business process management, we performed a content-based analysis of over 1,200 papers using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This analysis gives insights into the development of topics over time and identifies recently emerging topics

A Modeling Approach for Blockchain-inspired Business Models: An Extension of the e3 -Value Method

Blockchain enables new ways of organizing economic activities. Blockchain promises to reduce costs and time associated with intermediaries and strengthen trust in an ecosystem of actors. The impact of this promising technology is reflected in an emerging stream of research and various companies exploring the potential uses of blockchain technology and building new blockchain-inspired business models. While there are promising use cases of this new technology, research and practice are still in their early stages in terms of changing existing and creating new business models. We propose an extension of the e3 -value method to capture and represent the characteristics of blockchain-inspired business models. The approach is particularly useful for the value-based analysis of blockchain-inspired business models and the fundamental economic evaluation of these. It provides the foundation for capturing, communicating, innovating and experimenting with blockchain-inspired business models. We demonstrate the practicality of the extended e3 -value method by evaluating and applying it to an existing blockchain business model

ENABLING RISK-AWARE ENTERPRISE MODELING USING SEMANTIC ANNOTATIONS AND VISUAL RULES

The engagement in professional risk management is today a fact for most large organizations. In order to satisfy regulation and auditing requirements, an important step thereby is the identification and documentation of risks in an organization and the definition of measures for their mitigation. Thereby, the use of enterprise models provides the foundation for a systematic and holistic analysis of processes, organizational structures and IT systems. In the approach at hand we build upon the SeMFIS approach for semantic annotations of enterprise models with concepts from an OWL2 ontology. By providing an ontology for representing risks and mitigation measures, this additional information can be represented through annotations in arbitrary types of enterprise models without having to adapt the originally used modeling language. In addition, the approach provides a visual modeling language for representing rules according to the SWRL specification. This permits to process the semantic information provided by the annotations. The usage of the approach is illustrated through an example from the domain of risk-aware business process management. Upon the representation of risks in business processes using the semantic annotation approach, it is shown how SWRL rules can be used to automatically generate configurable risk reports

Multidimensional Analysis of Blockchain Data Using an ETL-based Approach

In this paper, a multidimensional model and an ETL workflow for blockchain data analysis are proposed. The workflow makes use of state-of-the-art open source tools and traditional data warehousing techniques to implement an extensible and efficient solution for the extraction, transformation, loading, and querying of data. Two scripts are implemented that aim at streamlining the ETL process, therefore simplifying the replication of the workflow to carry out a data analysis. Moreover, an exemplary use case demonstrating the analytical potential of the multidimensional model is presented and evaluated. Finally, strengths and limitations of this approach as well as the potential of future research are shown

A Comparison of Approaches for Visualizing Blockchains and Smart Contracts

The use of blockchains and smart contracts is currently explored in various fields of science and engineering due to their potential of radically changing the ways of doing business and the assumed elimination of traditional legal entities. Thereby, the complexity of the underlying technical relationships and mechanisms typically hampers the understanding by non-technical experts. In this paper we review approaches for visualizing blockchains and smart contracts. The investigation focuses on design and analysis approaches, concluding with requirements for a visual modelling language

A Formal Specification of the Horus Modeling Language Using FDMM

In this paper we show how a modeling language from the area of business process engineering can be formally specified using meta modeling concepts. This serves as a basis for the implementation on an industry-scale meta modeling platform. For this purpose we revert to the Horus modeling method and the FDMM formalism that has recently been introduced to formally describe meta models and models. Subsequently we report on the implementation of the modeling language on the ADOxx meta modeling platform and discuss the lessons learned by the application of this approach

An Approach to Support the Performance Management of Public Health Authorities using an IT based Modeling Method

In this paper we describe a modeling method for supportingperformance management by building upon the currentchallenges of public health authorities. Through focusingon the performance management requirements of nationalcompetent authorities (NCA) that fulll several duties inregard to the marketing authorization of medicinal products,we derive a modeling language, an according modeling procedureand mechanisms and algorithms. Thereby, particularrequirements in regard to the compliance to legal regulations,the competition of NCAs within the European Union, theallocation of resources under uncertainty, and the specichuman resource requirements of NCAs have to be taken intoaccount. The modeling language is formally described usinga meta model based approach and implemented on a metamodeling platform. For the evaluation, the modeling methodhas been applied in a scientic study with the Austriannational competent authority AGES PharmMed