Major Issues in Business Process Management: Key Concerns presented in Academy from a Brazilian Perspective

This paper is part of a major research in Business Process Management (BPM). There are international publications that identify the evolution of this area and practical challenges in several perspectives. This paper contributes with a comprehensive survey that identifies, from a Brazilian perspective, the evolution of the academic interest and the practical challenges of the national organizations. The expected results are, first, that this work can provide evidences to answer our research question: What are the issues BPM in Brazil? In addition, we expect to contribute with an approach and instruments that can be applied in the future in a new evaluation, following the same process of this research. This first part presents the results of a key concerns classification of all the papers presented in a Brazilian´s Conference: the Workshop of Business Process Management. With this first part, we aim to contribute by showing and discussing what are the academy keys concern and compare it with the BPM International Conference

Process Improvement Based on External Knowledge Context

The external environment of an organization is characterized by significant changes that occur in the social, economical, political and technological fields. The organization should know this setting and act effectively. A major challenge is how to define significant information in its diverse contexts. In a business process scenario, context could be defined as the minimum set of variables containing all relevant information impacting the design and implementation of a business process. Although there are a few proposals that deal with context associated to business process (Nunes et al. 2009)(Rosemann et al. 2008)(Saidani and Nurcan 2007), they still miss an explicit method that supports the identification of relevant external contexts that impact on specific activities during a business process execution. In this paper we describe a method for supporting the identification and prioritization of variables to be considered in the context of the external environment that impacts process activities execution

CXCL16/CXCR6 axis drives microglia/macrophages phenotype in physiological conditions and plays a crucial role in glioma

Microglia are patrolling cells that sense changes in the brain microenvironment and respond acquiring distinct phenotypes that can be either beneficial or detrimental for brain homeostasis. Anti-inflammatory microglia release soluble factors that might promote brain repair; however, in glioma, anti-inflammatory microglia dampen immune response and promote a brain microenvironment that foster tumor growth and invasion. The chemokine CXCL16 is expressed in the brain, where it is neuroprotective against brain ischemia, and it has been found to be over-expressed in glioblastoma (GBM). Considering that CXCL16 specific receptor CXCR6 is diffusely expressed in the brain including in microglia cells, we wanted to investigate the role of CXCL16 in the modulation of microglia cell activity and phenotype, and in the progression of glioma. Here we report that CXCL16 drives microglia polarization toward an anti-inflammatory phenotype, also restraining microglia polarization toward an inflammatory phenotype upon LPS and IFN? stimulation. In the context of glioma, we demonstrate that CXCL16 released by tumor cells is determinant in promoting glioma associated microglia/macrophages (GAMs) modulation toward an anti-inflammatory/pro-tumor phenotype, and that cxcr6ko mice, orthotopically implanted into the brain with GL261 glioma cells,survive longer compared to wild-type mice. We also describe that CXCL16/CXCR6 signaling acts directly on mouse glioma cells, as well as human primary GBM cells, promoting tumor cell growth, migration and invasion. All together these data suggest that CXCL16 signaling could represent a good target to modulate microglia phenotype in order to restrain inflammation or to limit glioma progression

Towards Aspects Identification in Business Process Through Process Mining

In business process models, elements can be scattered (repeated) within different processes, making it difficult to handle changes, analyze process for improvements, or check crosscutting impacts. These scattered elements are named as Aspects. Similar to the aspect-oriented paradigm in programming languages, in BPM, aspect handling has the goal to modularize the crosscutting concerns spread across the models. This process modularization facilitates the management of the process (reuse, maintenance and understanding). The current approaches for aspect identification are made manually; thus, resulting in the problem of subjectivity and lack of systematization. This paper proposes a method to automatically identify aspects in business process from its event logs. The method is based on mining techniques and it aims to solve the problem of the subjectivity identification made by specialists. The initial results from a preliminary evaluation showed evidences that the method identified correctly the aspects present in the process model

Process Mining Techniques in Internal Auditing: A Stepwise Case Study

A business process is a sequence of activities organized in a logical way in order to produce a service or a product that is valued for a particular group of customers. Process auditing in corporate environment aims to assess the degree of compliance of processes and their controls. Due to the volume of information that needs to be analyzed in an audit job, auditing´s cost can be very high. We argue that process mining techniques have the potential to improve this activity, allowing the auditor to meet the short deadlines, as well as bringing greater value to the senior management and reliability in the service provided by the audit. The goal of this paper is to discuss, through a case study, how process mining techniques can optimize and bring agility to the verification of process model compliance against the process actually performed. With this approach, it will be possible to detect errors and/or failures in activities or controls of a running process. The main contribution of this paper is to describe a simple set of steps that could be applied by auditors and experts in order to get introduced and to obtain the first insights in the process mining area

Implementation of Aspect-oriented Business Process Models with Web Services

In software development, crosscutting concerns, such as security, audit, access control, authentication, logging, persistence, transaction, error handling etc. can be modularized using the aspect-oriented paradigm. In busi- ness process modeling, aspects have been used to reduce visualization complexity, increase reuse and improve model maintainability. There are techniques which address aspects in modeling and implementation phases of business process; however, these techniques adopt different semantic representations, hindering the integration of these phases into the BPM lifecycle. This work proposes an architecture for service discovery capable of selecting web services that implement crosscutting concerns and meet the goals established in the aspect modeling phase, executing them accordingly with a prioritization. A proof of concept to analyze the proposed architecture and generated artifacts was performed. Afterwards, the proposal was evaluated by means of an experiment. The results suggest that the def- inition of an operational goal enables the business spe- cialists to concentrate on the modeling of the aspect without necessarily concerning its implementation, since a proper option for implementation is discovered during the execution of the process

Uncovering the Hidden Co-Evolution in the Work History of Software Projects

The monitoring of project-oriented business processes is difficult because their state is fragmented and represented by the progress of different documents and artifacts being worked on. This observation holds in particular for software development projects in which various developers work on different parts of the software concurrently. Prior contributions in this area have proposed a plethora of techniques to analyze and visualize the current state of the software artifact as a product. It is surprising that these techniques are missing to provide insights into what types of work are conducted at different stages of the project and how they are dependent upon another. In this paper, we address this research gap and present a technique for mining the software process including dependencies between artifacts. Our evaluation of various open-source projects demonstrates the applicability of our technique

MELHORIA DE PROCESSOS DE NEGÓCIO: SISTEMATIZANDO A SELEÇÃO DE PADRÕES DE REDESENHO

Business Process Management is increasingly present in organizations, and process improvement is one of its focuses. Patterns for process redesign have gathered the attention of some studies, which seek to provide solutions to recurring problems of business process improvement. However, the choice of these patterns is not an easy task, especially when performed in scenarios with large models and complex processes, which make the manual analysis a very costly task. This paper presents a method to assist in the analysis of these patterns by automating the choice of patterns to be applied, using information present in the process models.Gestão de Processos de Negócio está cada vez mais presente nas organizações e a melhoria de processos é um de seus focos. Padrões para redesenho de processos têm motivado alguns trabalhos, os quais buscam apresentar soluções para problemas recorrentes de melhoria de processos de negócio. Contudo, a escolha destes padrões não é uma tarefa simples, principalmente em cenários em que os modelos de processos são grandes e complexos, o que torna a análise manual uma tarefa muito custosa. Este artigo apresenta um método para auxiliar na análise destes padrões, por meio da automatização da escolha dos padrões a serem aplicados, utilizando informações presentes nos modelos de processos

Valuing Prior Learning: Designing an ICT Artifact to Assess Professional Competences Through Text Mining

Purpose: This paper introduces an ICT artifact that uses text mining to support the innovative and standardized assessment of professional competences within the validation of prior learning. By assessing, we mean comparing identified and documented professional competences against a standard or reference point. We evaluate the designed artifact by matching a set of curriculum vitae (CV) scraped from LinkedIn against a comprehensive model of professional competence. Design/Methodology/Approach: A design science approach informed the development and evaluation of the ICT artifact presented in this paper. Findings: A proof of concept shows that the ICT artifact can support assessors within the validation of prior learning procedure. Rather the output of such an ICT artifact can be used to structure documentation in the validation process. Research limitations/implications: Evaluating the artifact shows that ICT support to assess documented learning outcomes is a promising endeavor but remains a challenge. Further research should work on standardized ways to document professional competences, ICT artifacts that capture the semantic content of documents, and refine ontologies of theoretical models of professional competences. Practical implications: Text mining methods to assess professional competences rely on large bodies of textual data - thus a thoroughly built and large portfolio is necessary as input for this ICT artifact. Originality/value: Following the recent call of European policy makers to develop standardized and ICT-based approaches for the assessment of professional competences, we designed and evaluated an ICT artifact that supports the automatized assessment of professional competences within the validation of prior learning