INFORMAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES DESCRIPTION AS A MANDATORY MANAGERS’ COMPETENCE

In modern economic conditions, each company seeks to increase the level of competitiveness. In this regard, it is necessary to use modern management tools, including those based on information technology. For effective company management, it is necessary to timely examine its business processes. Effective management measures are selected depending on the completeness of the description and modeling of business processes. This article provides a description of business processes, describes the possible strategy and SWOT analysis on the example of car service activities. It is shown that to analyze the current activities of the company, they use the «goal tree», «problem tree», «strategy tree». The proposed company strategy is aimed at increasing the company's profits. SWOT analysis and analysis of the external environment of the company revealed the strengths and weaknesses to improve future activities. Based on a comprehensive analysis business process models in the «as is» and «to be» notations will be developed that will allow company management to assess the state of the companies business processes before and after their improvement. Such a research is aimed at choosing a strategy for improving or reengineering the company activities.

Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model

This paper presents experiences in applying the goal decomposition and scenario analysis model in the context of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). The relationships of goals, scenarios, as well as the understanding and description of business processes are discussed. Different methods of goal refinement, and the application of scenarios to support this process of refining goals and roles are reviewed. A case study is presented which serves to exemplify and validate the process of using scenarios in refining business process descriptions. We tried deriving full scenarios for business processes, but obtaining them from the organization's prescriptive goals was difficult. Explanatory scenarios that justify descriptive goals are easier to obtain but are fragmentary. We conclude that both types of scenario and goal analysis are necessary for effective BPR. The need for technology support for this process is discussed and attention is given to future anticipated research in this area.

Business process descriptions are useful documents that are becoming increasingly important for identifying and documenting business processes. They are particularly beneficial during discovery when information about the process is gathered in interviews or by observation. Such business process descriptions are written as natural language text, which makes them intrinsically ambiguous. For this reason, it is the major challenge to formulate them in a precise and correct way right from the start. Therefore, this paper presents a service oriented architecture that analyzes a process description written in natural language to generate a sound process description. Being sound means that a description is structured, unambiguous, reveals possible quality and soundness problems related to BPMN 2.0, and contains clear identifiers for all known process elements in the original text. More specifically, we develop specific analysis and transformation techniques that are integrated by our proposed architecture. For validation purposes, we have implemented a prototype of this architecture. Our evaluation demonstrates that our techniques to generate sound process descriptions cover an average of 95% of the information extracted from its original process description while maintaining quality properties. Finally, our architecture can be enhanced with additional services that contribute to the creation and management of processes descriptions in organizations.

Project repositories are a central asset in software development, as they preserve the knowledge gathered in past development activities. Locating relevant information in a vast project repository is problematic, because it requires manually tagging projects with accurate metadata, an activity which is time consuming and prone to errors and omissions. Just like any other artifact or web service, business processes can be stored in repositories to be shared and used by third parties, e.g., as building blocks for constructing new business processes. The success of such a paradigm depends partly on the availability of effective search tools to locate business processes that are relevant to the user purposes. A handful of researchers have investigated the problem of business process discovery using as input syntactical and structural information that describes business processes. This work explores an additional source of information encoded in the form of annotations that semantically describe business processes. Business processes can be semantically described using the so called abstract business processes. These are designated by concepts from an ontology which additionally captures their relationships. This ontology can be built in an automatic fashion from a collection of (concrete) business processes, and this work illustrates how it can be refined by domain experts and used in the discovery of business processes, with the purpose of reuse and increase in design productivity.

Business Process (BP) improvement and alike require accurate descriptions of the BPs. We suggest to describe BPs as use case specifications. A use case specification comprises a description of the context of the BP, the interactions between the agents involved in the BP, the interactions of these agents with an automated system supporting the BP and attached system internal requirements. Constructing such specifications remains a difficult task. Our proposal is to use textual scenarios as inputs, describing fragments of the BP, and to guide, using a set of rules, their incremental production and integration in a use case specification also presented in a textual form. The paper presents the structure of a use case, the linguistic approach adopted for textual scenarios analysis and the guided process for constructing use case specifications from scenarios along with the guidelines and support rules grounding the process. The process is illustrated with a real case study borrowed to an Electricity Company.

Enterprise management systems are complex and large information systems which support business processes of an enterprise. This entails dealing with issues such as the precedence between tasks and activities within a process, as well as resources, roles and enterprise assets involved. These characteristics state that the processes modeling phase that compose the system play a relevant role. Both the description and validation of processes are very important because undetected mistakes in this phase will have a negative effect in the upcoming phases and in the final system quality. This paper deals with description and validation of enterprise management process through a framework that combine some technologies that have great acceptation in both software researchers and developers. The framework is based on the paradigm of Model Driven Architecture and is complemented with ontologies which raise the possibilities to semantically validate the business processes.

Business process descriptions are usually stored in internal enterprise repositories. In order to be able to reuse Business Processes (a.k.a. BPs), BP designers require some tools to help them to discover processes (or fragments of processes) in the repository based on these descriptions. In most cases discovery is a difficult task (the diversity of modeling languages, the process descriptions are very close to the IT level being far from the business level, there is a lack of automatic tools, etc.).

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.

Nowadays, the problem in business process management (BPM) is that BPM systems should both be easy to use for business process developers and be based on a sound formal method. Business process management systems are often based on semiformal modeling techniques such as event-driven process chains (EPC) or UML. Unlike semiformal modeling techniques, the process calculus CSP comes with mature verification sup- port. Surprisingly little work has been done on using CSP for business process modeling and management. In this paper, we present our approach to business process management, which is based on the observation that CSP is well suited not only for specifying business processes and verifying work???ows but also for executing work???ows using our CSP4J framework. We report on a work???ow server, which is specified in CSP and implemented using our CSP4J framework. The server accepts work???ows that are modeled in CSP and also implemented using CSP4J. This allows us to integrate the mature verification support of CSP into both the management system itself and the development process of the end users’ business process definitions.

The analysis of graphic and formal methods and techniques for description of business processes is conducted. It is revealed the lack of a common approach to information presenting of all business processes lifecycle. The proposed information technology for combining different descriptions in a unit and methods of transition from one description mode to another is not yet possible to implement without loss of information and ensuring all participants of business processes lifecycle in a single conceptual framework. A comprehensive interrelated description of all aspects of business processes is proposed. This description appears in text, image, formal and algorithmic species as different forms of a single process models, which complement each other and can best solve various problems. This approach provides a convenient way of describing the process by specialists of different levels: from the head in the conceptual process design (planning) to direct performer during his work in securing the conditions for monitoring and control process. The basis for the creation of an information technology and software environment for planning, modeling, analysis, support and performance management of business processes is developed.

We investigate abstract common traits of longitudinal processes related to digital and green transformation of business processes, such as LCA analysis, CO2 footprint evaluation, and production cost analysis. The common abstraction allows to develop general tools and joint understanding of the three most relevant analytical processes significant to economic entities: production cost allows the undertaking to stay competitive, while conforming to forthcoming regulation involving either calculation of CO2 footprint (relevant to most value chains in European economy) or LCA analysis of products (relevant to major undertakings that are subject to sustainability reporting regulations). The result is an idea for a domain specific language that describes the concepts to calculate the stated process indicators and describe the data required in these calculations.

Currently, for the effective development of the activities of any company, modern information technologies and information systems are used. In the conditions of digitalization of the economy, special attention is paid to business processes of interaction with customers of companies, the main requirement of which is the mobility of the proposed operations and services. The use of modern tools to improve business processes is designed to increase the efficiency of any company. Depending on the scope of the company, different tools are used. In this regard, it is advisable to describe and analyze the activities of the company, and then its business processes. The result a list of business processes requiring improvement will be.This paper discusses the features and methods of automating business processes using digital technologies, analyzes the activities of the company (using the example of a travel agency), describes its main business processes. The theoretical and methodological description of the features of automation of the company showed the possibility of using modern IT tools to increase the competitiveness of the company and the level of customer satisfaction. As a result of the research of the activities of the travel agency «1001 tour», an analysis of external and internal factors affecting the company. Description of business processes showed the need to improve interaction with customers through the introduction of mobile technology. The theoretical significance of the study is to describe the features of improving customer service. The practical significance of this work is due to the possibility of using the results as a basis for developing models of the main business processes in the notions «as is» and «to be», preparing a project for introducing innovations and conducting a preliminary assessment of its economic efficiency.

In the modern business scenario, organizations are vesting high efforts in managing process sustainability as part of their operations management practices. The global environmental concerns for the welfare of the society have facilitated this change. Research studies have reported Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as one of the prerequisites in developing and maintaining efficient business processes. The process sustainability related initiatives and various processes related regulatory compliances have created the need for sophisticated IT tools like BPM (Business Process Management) and BI (Business Intelligence) in organizations. Thus with the advancement of ICT, a strong desire to enhance the business process performance through BPM and BI applications is felt across organizations. However, there is scant research available on leveraging the advantages of these applications in sustainability development. Therefore, this paper aims to present a conceptual architecture framework using an integrated BPM and BI solution to develop an orientation among practitioners and academicians towards the inclusion of ICT in attaining a sustainable, energy efficient business operations or processes. The framework is based on the literature pertaining to the role of BPM and BI in process sustainability as well as from the inputs of practitioners involved in the field of BPM and BI.

Forest managers are increasingly recognizing the value of disturbance-based land management techniques such as prescribed burning. Unauthorized, "arson" fires are common in the southeastern United States where a legacy of agrarian cultural heritage persists amidst an increasingly forest-dominated landscape. This paper reexamines unauthorized fire-setting in the state of Georgia, USA from a historical ecology perspective that aims to contribute to historically informed, disturbance-based land management. A space-time permutation analysis is employed to discriminate systematic, management-oriented unauthorized fires from more arbitrary or socially deviant fire-setting behaviors. This paper argues that statistically significant space-time clusters of unauthorized fire occurrence represent informal management regimes linked to the legacy of traditional land management practices. Recent scholarship has pointed out that traditional management has actively promoted sustainable resource use and, in some cases, enhanced biodiversity often through the use of fire. Despite broad-scale displacement of traditional management during the 20th century, informal management practices may locally circumvent more formal and regionally dominant management regimes. Space-time permutation analysis identified 29 statistically significant fire regimes for the state of Georgia. The identified regimes are classified by region and land cover type and their implications for historically informed disturbance-based resource management are discussed.