Role of Process Modeling in Software Service Design

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this method, we define how to create a mapping between entities and process models, forming a framework to identify outdated process models through monitoring the entities.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.

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 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

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.

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.

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

Business processes and information systems mutually affect each other in non-trivial ways. Frequently, the business process design and the information system design are not well aligned. This means that business processes are designed without taking the information system impact into account, and vice versa. Missing alignment at design time often results in quality problems at runtime, such as large response times of information systems, large process execution times, overloaded information systems or interrupted processes. Aligning business process quality and information system quality at design time requires to
\nsolve the following problems (P). Business process quality and information system quality have to be characterized. P1: In contrast to information system quality, which is specified in the ISO/IEC 9126 standard, for example, there is no common and comprehensive understanding of business process quality. P2: Beyond that, current business process
\nmodeling notations do not aim to represent quality aspects. The impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, is unknown at design
\ntime. P3: The mutual impact between business processes and information systems must be predicted at design time.
\nIn this thesis, the Business Process Quality Reference-Model (BPQRM), a quality model for business processes, is introduced. The model allows for a comprehensive characterization of business process quality (P1). The BPQRM is applied successfully in a case study to
\nidentify potential for process quality improvement in practice. Based on the BPQRM an existing process modeling notation is extended by model elements to represent quality
\naspects (P2). Simulation is a powerful means to predict the impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, at design time. This thesis proposes two simulation approaches to predict the mutual impact between business processes and information systems, in terms of performance (P3). The approach Business
\nIT Impact Simulation (BIIS) defines interfaces between the business process simulation and the information system simulation. Performance-relevant information is exchanged
\nvia the interfaces between both simulations. Using business process simulation and information system simulation in isolation, workload burstiness is not adequately reflected.
\nThis is especially true for occasional, volatile peak loads. Workload burstiness can significantly affect the performance of business processes and information systems. The approach Integrated Business IT Impact Simulation (IntBIIS) for the integration of business processes and information systems in a single simulation allows for reflecting workload burstiness correctly. The simulation approaches support the comparison of design alternatives and the verification of a certain design against requirements. A case study confirms the feasibility in practice and the acceptance from practitioners’ point of
\nview.

PurposeThe purposes of this paper are: (1) to identify what types of business process operation controllers are discussed in literature and how can they be classified in order to establish the available body of knowledge in the literature, and then, (2) to identify which concepts are relevant for business process operation control and how are these concepts related in order to offer a reference model for assessing how well are control layers enforced in the dynamic stable nature of an enterprise' business processes operation.Design/methodology/approachOne cycle of the circular framework for literature review as proposed by Vom Brocke et al. (2009) is followed. Five stages are comprised: (1) definition of review scope (Section 1 and 2), (2) conceptualization of topic (Section 3), (3) literature search (Section 4), (4) literature analysis and synthesis (Section 5), and (5) definition of a research agenda (Section 6 that also concludes the paper). Vom Brocke, J., Simons, A., Niehaves, B., Niehaves, B., Reimer, K., Plattfaut, R., and Cleven, A. (2009), “Reconstructing the giant: on the importance of rigour in documenting the literature search process”, ECIS 2009 Proceedings, Vol. 161.FindingsResults indicate that (1) many studies exist in the literature, but no integrated knowledge is proposed, hindering the advance of knowledge in this field, (2) a knowledge gap exists between the implemented solutions and the conceptualization needed to generalize the solution to other contexts. Also, the ontology proposed provides a reference model for assessing the maturity of the business process control operation.Research limitations/implicationsThe contents contained in the paper needs to be further deepened to include the concepts of “business process management” and “business process mining”, as well as a semantic equivalence study between concepts can integrate better this conceptual framework and identify similarities. Then, the relationship between industries and dynamically stable business processes operation concepts have not yet been fully investigated. Thirdly, the atypical curve of interest that business processes operational control has been receiving in literature is not fully understood.Practical implicationsSome example applications that could benefit from this ontology are (1) security policy for business processes fine grained access control; (2) business processes enforced with decentralized policies, e.g. blockchain; (3) business process compliance and change; or (4) intelligent enterprise decision-making process, e.g. using AI trained neural network to support the human decision to choose if a control actuation is positive or negative instead of relying only on human-based decisions.Social implicationsWe understand that business process operation is a dynamically stable system, where steady motion is achieved with the continuous imposition of actor's actions. Therefore, all the work that contribute to the development of knowledge regarding the actor's actions in their execution environment offer the ability to optimize, and/or reengineering, business processes delivering more social value or better social conditions.Originality/valueIn the best of our knowledge this work is unique in the sense that integrates a set of concepts that is rarely, or never, combined. Table 3 corroborates this result.

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.

Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.

Semi-structured business processes are emerging at a rapid pace in industries such as government, insurance, banking and healthcare. The workflows underlying these case-oriented processes are non-deterministic. They are mostly driven by human decision making and content status and they may change frequently depending on factors such as economic conditions, legislative policy changes and technological upgrades. This paper describes a method to detect changes in a running business process by conducting spectral graph analysis of sets of execution traces of the process. This method is beneficial because it does not require mining a process model of the business process, and is consequently independent of any assumptions about the nature of the business process. This makes it particularly applicable to case-oriented semi-structured business processes whose lifecycle is not fully driven by a formal process model. In this paper we present our algorithm for computing graph spectra from business process execution traces, and discuss some initial promising results, as well as exciting ideas generated by this research for future work.

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.

Business analysts define business process models for describing a series of tasks to produce services or products to serve business goals. Hence business process models represent business requirements for development of the software that enables automation of the business processes. When tasks in a business process are changed, such changes also trigger changes in the artifacts that have been produced during development of the related software. Analysis of an impact a business process change has on the software is useful for the software project manager and the system analyst to plan the effort to change the artifacts, including the software itself, accordingly. This paper presents a traceability impact analysis using traceability information of the old version of the business process model and its related software artifacts. The impact analysis is based on different patterns of business process changes that are made to the old business process model to create a new version of the model. Detection algorithms are used to identify various patterns of process structure changes so that business process tasks that are changed and software artifacts that would be impacted by the changes can be reported. The paper also discusses a supporting tool and its evaluation.

Organizations must constantly adapt due to the rapid rate of technological development, market conditions, and customer expectations. The multidimensional world of catalysts that drive changes in corporate processes and applications is explored in this systematic review. Every business must adopt the changes if it wants to compete in the market and outlast its rivals. A wide range of factors, including internal and external forces, can cause applications and business processes to change. These changes are frequently necessary to stay current with the shifting demands of the market, technology advancements, organizational requirements, competitive pressures, legal compliance, environmental and sustainability programs, market trends, and consumer insights. Taking this into account, this chapter attempts to concentrate on the causes of changes in business processes and applications by analyzing the perspective.