Detecting changes in a semi-structured business process through spectral graph analysis

The workflow management technology is one enabling technology for achieving IT-support for business process oriented information systems. However, currently available workflow systems focus on solutions for well-structured business processes, the execution of which are known a priori, i.e. before enacting the processes. One main disadvantage of such systems is their deficiency in coping with some real-life situations which demand for a flexible process support. Today's systems usually strictly distinguish so called build time components (for process definition) and run time components (for process enaction). In order to deal with the aspect flexibility of business processes, it is important to overcome this phased model of process management. In this chapter, so-called semi-structured business processes are introduced. Furthermore a classification scheme is introduced for identifying different kinds of semi-structured process models. For some of the classes of semi-structured business processes, examples for a suitable IT support are given.

Purpose Due to a lack of event data, organizations using Business Process Management may struggle to update their process models whenever business process changes occur. As such, alternative data sources are needed to detect and monitor business process changes. Design/methodology/approach We conducted interviews with domain experts to analyze real business processes and classify any identified changes using Reijers and Mansar's framework on business process redesign heuristics. Based on the results, we proposed a taxonomy of entity groups as well as a method for identifying entities in process models based on the taxonomy. With this method, we define how to create a mapping between entities and process models, forming a framework to identify outdated process models through monitoring the entities. Findings The analyses of 25 business processes let us define three entity groups that form our taxonomy. We confirmed the feasibility of our entity identification method by classifying process elements of 85 pre-existing process models according to the taxonomy. Regarding the mapping that forms the basis of our framework, we found it necessary to define requirement recommendations to ensure its consistency and rigor. Originality/value This study offers a novel approach to handling the challenges of business process change. By emphasizing the identification and use of entities in the analysis of business process changes, it provides a holistic approach to monitoring the work systems of an organization.

Organizations often change their business processes in reaction to changes in the environment or as a result of improvement efforts. These changes lead to adjustments in the Business Process Support (BPS) system. The impact of a change in a business process may extend beyond the specific point that has been changed, affecting preconditions required for other activities, outputs to be created, or requiring new inputs. This article introduces a concept of a scope of a change, whose identification facilitates focused efforts when adjusting the BPS system to changes in business processes. The article presents a taxonomy of modifications that can be made to a process model and characterizes different modification types in terms of possible scopes of the changes made. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Propagating changes between aligned process models

Enterprise Social Network (ESN) gain widespread adoption and popularity by many organizations as it provides a new way of social business interactions. However, there are some limitations found in ESN from integration with running business processes (BP) perspective. BP service designers and developers can't utilize its generated structured and unstructured contents in running BPs. This leads organizations to spend more efforts and time in defining social BP and integrate it with running BPs manually. Building upon previous works on reengineering BP to fuse it with social interaction, this paper proposes a framework to interface ESN BP into organization running BP. The framework fits with the structure data of ESN as input to generate web service in virtual environment. It defines the refactoring process of ESN database before publishing it as a web service into SOA environment based on features of open source and commercial platform services available to researchers and experts.

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

The article is devoted to development of provisions for securing business flexibility in conditions of war in Ukraine. It is recommended that even during the war Ukrainian companies should strive to follow the scientific approaches to management, including the process approach as one of the most widely used. The article stresses the advantages of process approach to management and Business Process Management as its practical implementation, such as standardization of business processes (allowing companies to continuously follow the optimal way to perform the business process, to automate it and to decrease the variability of its outputs); integration of different functional areas in company’s activity; improved productivity; continuous business process improvement; visibility, transparency and measurability of the company’s activity, allowing to determine and eliminate the root causes of business process failures; clear definition and distribution of duties, roles and responsibilities in the company; improved knowledge management and auditing procedures. Despite the point of view that Business Process Management decreases the business flexibility due to standardization of processes, the article states that being properly designed, business processes must have multiple alternative scenarios, allowing to quickly changing the way the business process is performed and thus improving its flexibility. But even if a company was not prepared for the scenario of war, it can follow the recommendations provided in this article in order to secure the flexibility of its entire business and separate business processes. Such recommendations include actualization the key reference points in the company’s activity (goals, customers, suppliers, products, etc.); identification of the most problematic business processes affected by the war; development or change of the business process descriptions, which must be more or less detailed depending on the level of process, its technological variability and the level of uncertainty in environment; reviewing the requirements to business processes outputs and inputs; and reviewing the business rules related to changes in business processes.

Organizations must comply with a number of external and internal regulations for business governance and must ensure that their processes are running accordingly to requirements of regulations. Therefore business process and regulations compliance analysis audit and management tasks take a very important role in daily operational activities for each organization. Due to high complexity this task can become challenging. In some domains regulations are changing rapidly. Process models must be flexible and easy adjustable to changing requirements, since the lack of ability to comply with regulations can lower down the competitiveness of an organizations. Thus, rapid changes of regulations require rapid changes of related business processes. The goal of the PhD work is to develop business process and regulations compliance management technology which should enable business process construction from regulations and change monitoring of regulations and business processes to ensure easy and rapid modification of business process model or regulations, thus also ensuring compliance.

Enterprises in today’s networked economy face numerous information management challenges, both from a process management perspective as well as a decision support perspective. While there have been significant relevant advances in the areas of business process management as well as decision sciences, several open research issues exist. In this paper, we highlight the following key challenges. First, current process modeling and management techniques lack in providing a seamless integration of decision models and tools in existing business processes, which is critical to achieve organizational objectives. Second, given the dynamic nature of business processes in networked enterprises, process management approaches that enable organizations to react to business process changes in an agile manner are required. Third, current state-of-the-art decision model management techniques are not particularly amenable to distributed settings in networked enterprises, which limits the sharing and reuse of models in different contexts, including their utility within managing business processes. In this paper, we present a framework for decision-enabled dynamic process management that addresses these challenges. The framework builds on computational formalisms, including the structured modeling paradigm for representing decision models, and hierarchical task networks from the artificial intelligence (AI) planning area for process modeling. Within the framework, interleaved process planning (modeling), execution and monitoring for dynamic process management throughout the process lifecycle is proposed. A service-oriented architecture combined with advances from the semantic Web field for model management support within business processes is proposed.

Pessimistic Predicate/Transform Model for Long Running Business Processes

As business process management is increasingly applied in practice, more companies document their operations in the form of process models. Since users require descriptions of one process on various levels of detail, there are often multiple models created for the same process. Business process model abstraction emerged as a technique reducing the number of models to be stored: given a detailed process model, business process model abstraction delivers abstract representations for the same process. A key problem in many abstraction scenarios is the transition from detailed activities in the initial model to coarse-grained activities in the abstract model. This transition is realized by an aggregation operation clustering multiple activities to a single one. So far, humans decide on how to aggregate, which is expensive. This paper presents a semi-automated approach to activity aggregation that reduces the human effort significantly. The approach takes advantage of an activity meronymy relation, i.e., part-of relation defined between activities. The approach is semi-automated, as it proposes sets of meaningful aggregations, while the user still decides. The approach is evaluated by a real-world use case.KeywordsBusiness ProcessDomain OntologyNode DistanceBusiness Process ManagementBusiness Process ModelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

One of the tools used by governments to bring about organizational transformation is business process change (BPC). The objective of BPC is to bring dramatic changes in the way organizations conduct their business. Though the BPC concept seems to be conceptually appealing, it has been reported by many scholars that BPC comes short of its expectations. This study aimed at identifying and assessing the factors that contribute for successful implementation of BPC projects in organizations of the developing country context. The factors identified as important include the degree to which strategic business process changes are included in the BPC project, level and complexity of problems encountered; the degree to which proposed BPC objectives are being identified and incorporated in these change project plans and are actually derived; and the impact of BPC endeavors on business processes and on the organization. The study developed hypotheses about the BPC implementation process and the test results were found to be consistent with the hypotheses. The result of the study revealed that organizations give little attention to strategic processes critical to the very existence of the organization and employees’ empowerment recommended in the BPC literature. While implementing BPC, the most frequent problems seem to be very difficult to address such as communication barriers, the unforeseen magnitude of the BPC effort, and its interruption to operations. Based on findings of the study, conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made for practitioners to focus on success factors such as top management commitment. Well organized BPC project team and plans, focus on outcomes, sufficient resources and fund, well defined communications plan, team spirit and good working environment. Keywords : Business Process Change, Success Factors, BPC Outcomes

Service-oriented architecture technically facilitates business process management as it enables software to evolve along with changing business processes by simply recomposing software services. From a theoretical point of view it is, thus, natural to take business processes as a starting point for software service design. However, deriving software services strictly top-down from business processes is awkward from a practical point of view: The resulting services are too fine-grained in scope and too vast in number, and particular process control flows become cemented in service orchestrations. In this paper, another approach of software service design is described that, though starting from process models, avoids these drawbacks. The approach is illustrated by a practical example. The presented service design approach has been successfully applied in industry for more than 14 years and enables agile service implementation.

The Cloud computing paradigm is adopted for its several advantages like reduction of cost incurred when using a set of resources. However, despite the many proven benefits of using a Cloud infrastructure to run business processes, it is still faced with a major problem that can compromise its success: the lack of guidance for choosing between multiple offerings. Moreover, when running business processes it is difficult to automate all tasks and several objectives often conflicting must be taken into account. For this, the authors propose a set of scheduling strategies for business processes in Cloud contexts. More precisely, the authors propose three bi-criteria complementary approaches for scheduling business processes on distributed Cloud resources while taking into account its elastic computing characteristic that allows users to allocate and release compute resources (virtual machines) on-demand and its business model based on pay as you go. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the number of virtual machine is infinite while the number of human resources is finite. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed approaches present good performances.

The increase in interest in supporting organization to gain a competitive edge in a rapidly changing market environment necessitates considering means to handle business process changes. This paper is focused on approaches of flexible business process management and attempts to address variation issue encountered in adapting run-time business processes to dynamic changes. A survey of the classification of variation types and the underlying variation strategies is described. These variation strategies can be constructed using the form of ECA rule to allow business processes to be automatically changed on request during their execution. Since considering the benefits brought by knowledge-based technology, a variation repository can be built on valuable experience about how to handle past variation cases and hence enable the current variation problems to be resolved intelligently. In order to implement the proposed approach, variation knowledge-based flexible business process management system extends the underlying architecture of workflow management coalition's reference system. The overall architecture of the extended system is provided.