On Modeling and Analyzing Cost Factors in Information Systems Engineering

Introducing enterprise information systems (EIS) is usually associated with high costs. It is therefore crucial to understand those factors that determine or influence these costs. Though software cost estimation has received considerable attention during the last decades, it is difficult to apply existing approaches to EIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these methods to deal with the dynamic interactions of the many technological, organizational and projectdriven cost factors which specifically arise in the context of EIS. Picking up this problem, we introduce the EcoPOST framework to investigate the complex cost structures of EIS engineering projects through qualitative cost evaluation models. This paper extends previously described concepts and introduces design rules and guidelines for cost evaluation models in order to enhance the development of meaningful and useful EcoPOST cost evaluation models. A case study illustrates the benefits of our approach. Most important, our EcoPOST framework is an important tool supporting EIS engineers in gaining a better understanding of the critical factors determining the costs of EIS engineering projects

Business process redesign for effective e-commerce processes in the service industry

Many companies have found out the hard way that successful e-commerce requires more than a flashy web presence. Existing business processes must be seamlessly integrated with the new, electronic form of interaction with suppliers and customers. Despite this insight, little research has focused on the transformation of doing business to achieve the presumed benefits of e-commerce. This paper gives directions on how processes may be reengineered with this aim, particularly within the service industry. The presented views are based on existing research into Business Process Reengineering best practices. Careful consideration in this paper is given to the description ofthe conceptual background, which is used to classify existing research and to position the contribution of this paper. The guidelines which are discussed are illustrated by process models, represented by UML Activity diagrams

UnconstrainedMiner : efficient discovery of generalized declarative process models

Process discovery techniques derive a process model from observed behavior (e.g., event logs). In case of less structured processes, declarative models have notable advantages over procedural models. A declarative model consists of a set of temporal constraints over the activities in the event log. In this paper, we address three limitations of current discovery techniques: their unclear semantics of declarative constraints for business processes, their non-performative discovery of constraints, and their potential identification of vacuous constraints. We implemented our contributions as a declarative discovery algorithm for the Declare language. Our evaluations on a real-life event log indicate that it outperforms state of the art techniques by several orders of magnitude

Product based workflow support : a recommendation service for dynamic workflow execution

Product Based Workflow Design (PBWD) is a revolutionary and successful new approach to workflow process support. A description of the product, the Product Data Model (PDM), is central in this approach. While other research so far has focused on deriving a process model from the PDM, this paper presents a way to directly execute the PDM, leading to a more dynamic and flexible support for the workflow process. Based on the information available for a case the next step to be performed is determined using a strategy of e.g. lowest cost or shortest processing time. A prototype implementing these execution recommendations is presented

Product based workflow support : a recommendation service for dynamic workflow execution

Product Based Workflow Design (PBWD) is a revolutionary and successful new approach to workflow process support. A description of the product, the Product Data Model (PDM), is central in this approach. While other research so far has focused on deriving a process model from the PDM, this paper presents a way to directly execute the PDM, leading to a more dynamic and flexible support for the workflow process. Based on the information available for a case the next step to be performed is determined using a strategy of e.g. lowest cost or shortest processing time. A prototype implementing these execution recommendations is presented

The PrICE tool kit: tool support for process improvement

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