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

Data-driven Modeling and Coordination of Large Process Structures

In the engineering domain, the development of complex products (e.g., cars) necessitates the coordination of thousands of (sub-)processes. One of the biggest challenges for process management systems is to support the modeling, monitoring and maintenance of the many interdependencies between these sub-processes. The resulting process structures are large and can be characterized by a strong relationship with the assembly of the product; i.e., the sub-processes to be coordinated can be related to the different product components. So far, sub-process coordination has been mainly accomplished manually, resulting in high efforts and inconsistencies. IT support is required to utilize the information about the product and its structure for deriving, coordinating and maintaining such data-driven process structures. In this paper, we introduce the COREPRO framework for the data-driven modeling of large process structures. The approach reduces modeling efforts significantly and provides mechanisms for maintaining data-driven process structures

A Thing Called "Fluid Process" - Beyond Rigidity in Business Process Support

This keynote reports on a new class of processes – so called fluid processes - whose "engineering" and "use" is indistinguishable. Fluid processes are continually being adapted and reformed to fit the actual needs and constraints of the situation in hand and to fulfill the overall goals of the involved actors in the best possible way. We present a detailed review of challenges and techniques that exist for the support of fluid processes. We give insights into their nature, discuss fundamental challenges to be tackled, summarize basic technologies enabling fluid processes at the information system level, and describe advanced applications of fluid processes

The Next Wave of Research in Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) has been evolving as a research discipline for more than a decade and a multitude of innovative concepts, methods and techniques have been suggested, e.g., related to process modeling languages, process model analyses, process enactment infrastructures, process fexibility, and process mining. Although BPM has matured as a research discipline, there is still a gap between its promises and its actual achievements in practice. This keynote speech reflects on this gap, discusses emerging challenges, and relates BPM research to current waves like "Big Data", "Big Software" and "Cloud Computing", which provide new prospects for future BPM research

What BPM Technology Can Do for Healthcare Process Support

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering personalized services to their patients in a cost-effective and efficient manner. This, in turn, requires advanced IT support for healthcare processes covering both organizational procedures and knowledge-intensive, dynamic treatment processes. Nowadays, required agility is often hindered by a lack of flexibility in hospital information systems. To overcome this inflexibility a new generation of information systems, denoted as process-aware information systems (PAISs), has emerged. In contrast to data- and function-centered information systems, a PAIS separates process logic from application code and thus provides an additional architectural layer. However, the introduction of process-aware hospital information systems must neither result in rigidity nor restrict staff members in their daily work. This keynote presentation reflects on recent developments from the business process management (BPM) domain, which enable process adaptation, process flexibility, and process evolution. These key features will be illustrated along existing BPM frameworks. Altogether, emerging BPM methods, concepts and technologies will contribute to further enhance IT support for healthcare processes

Visualizing Large Business Process Models: Challenges, Techniques, Applications

Large process models may comprise hundreds or thousands of process elements, like activities, gateways, and data objects. Presenting such process models to users and enabling them to interact with these models constitute crucial tasks of any process-aware information systems (PAISs). Existing PAISs, however, neither provide adequate techniques for visualizing and abstracting process models nor for interacting with them. In particular, PAISs do not provide tailored process visualizations as needed in complex application environments. This paper presents examples of large process models and discusses some of the challenges to be tackled when visualizing and abstracting respective models. Further, it presents a comprehensive framework that allows for personalized process model visualizations, which can be tailored to the specific needs of the different user groups. First, process model complexity can be reduced by abstracting the models, i.e., by eliminating or aggregating process elements not relevant in the given visualization context. Second, the appearance of process elements can be customized independent of the process modeling language used. Third, different visualization formats (e.g., process diagrams, process forms, and process trees) are supported. Finally, it will be discussed how tailored visualizations of process models may serve as basis for changing and evolving process models at a high level of abstraction

Workflow Patterns for Business Process Modeling

For its reuse advantages, workflow patterns (e.g., control flow patterns, data patterns, resource patterns) are increasingly attracting the interest of both researchers and vendors. Frequently, business process or workflow models can be assembeled out of a set of recurrent process fragments (or recurrent business functions), each of them having generic semantics that can be described as a pattern. To our best knowledge, so far, there has been no (empirical) work evidencing the existence of such recurrent patterns in real workflow applications. Thus, in this paper we elaborate the frequency with which certain patterns occur in practice. Furthermore, we investigate completeness of workflow patterns (based on recurrent functions) with respect to their ability to capture a large variety of business processes

Integrating Users in Object-aware Process Management Systems: Issues and Challenges

Despite the increasing maturity of contemporary Workflow Management Systems (WfMS), there still exist numerous process-aware application systems with more or less hard-coded process logic. This does not only cause high maintenance efforts (e.g. costly code adaptions), but also results in hard-coded rules for controlling the access to business processes, business functions, and business data. In particular, the assignment of users to process activities needs to be compliant with the rights granted for executing business functions and for accessing business data. A major reason for not using WfMS in a broader context is the inflexibility provided by their activity-centered paradigm, which also limits the access control strategies offered by them. This position paper discusses key challenges for a process management technology in which processes, data objects and users are well integrated in order to ensure a sufficient degree of flexibility. We denote such technology as Object-Aware Process Management System and consider related research as fundamental for the further maturation of process management technology