Using View Process Models in Collaborative Business Processes

This chapter introduces a modelling language called Awareness Net for both representation as well as measuring the knowledge-sharing requirements in collaborative business processes. It is a conceptual model that facilitates representation and analysis of knowledge-sharing requirements of the actors in collaborative business processes. The representation and measurement are handled by a set of collaborative semantic concepts and their relationships. The proposed language enforces overall specification of what matters to the actors in collaborative processes when collaborating in business process to keep them aware of the collaboration context.

To solve the problem of modeling cross-organizational business process, a method of mining the cross-organizational businessprocess model from event logs is proposed. The method describes the different aspects of the cross-organizational business processfrom three perspectives: internal perspective, public perspectiveand collaborative perspective, so as to gain the intra-organization-al process model, the inter-organizational public process model, the collaborative process model in cross-organizational collaborat-ion business. The intra-organizational process model formed bymining, analyzing and sorting the running log of the organization involved in cross-organizational collaboration. The inter-organiza-tional process model is obtained by simplifying the intra-organ-izational process model, and finally the cooperative process modelcan be modelled. Compared with the existing modeling methods, this method can protect the details of the internal business proc-ess, and provides the public process model to public only, which can effectively support the individual characteristics of thecross- organizational business process.

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing service-oriented business process mashup in an appropriate way will deliver the collaborative business process more flexibility, adaptability and agility. In this chapter, we describe new landscape for supporting collaborative business processes. The different solutions and tools for collaborative business process applications are presented. A new approach for supporting situational collaborative business process, process-oriented mashup is introduced. We have highlighted the security and scalability challenges of process-oriented mashups. Further, benefits of using process-oriented mashup are discussed.

Current globalisation of economy drives organisations to streamline their business processes and to quickly form collaboration for responding to fast changing market opportunities. This thesis is dedicated to proposing a novel organisation-oriented view methodology for collaborative business process management. This methodology observes a collaborative business process from the perspective of individual organisations, and provides comprehensive solutions to the privacy, autonomy and openness issues in business collaboration. In this thesis, we first propose a relative workflow model to formalise the business process modelling from the organisation-oriented perspective. This model deploys a constraint-based visibility control mechanism to protect business privacy, and to distinguish the partnerships between collaborating organisations. At the instance level, we investigate the instance correspondence in a collaborative business process, and characterise the instance correspondence in terms of the workflow cardinality and instance correlations. An extended Petri net model formalises the representation and dynamic tracing of the instance correspondence. On this basis, we utilise the instance correspondence to perform inter-organisational workflow tracking from each participating organisation point of view. In addition, we develop a series of representation matrices and matrix operations that allow dynamic tracking and monitoring on collaborative business processes. To demonstrate the applicability of the organisation-oriented view methodology, we conduct two case studies on a virtual organisation alliance and a transient supply chain, respectively. Finally, a system design is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility and deployment of our methodology in the Web service environment. The research reported in this thesis provides a comprehensive solution for collaborative business process management. The reported research puts forward an innovative idea and constructs a solid foundation for future research towards collaborative business process management.

The advancements in information and communication technology (ICT) have resulted in the new concepts being developed in this discipline. Ubiquitous and pervasive computing are among the number of other concepts provided by the ICT. Especially these concepts are providing scope for radical changes in business processes of organizations. It would become a necessity for integrating business with these concepts to face the new realities in business process in organizations. This chapter describes the historical background of commerce in electronic environment, the concepts related to context computing, ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing, and Grid computing. Further it explains the recent trends and also talks about the three business models with these concepts incorporated in three different contexts.

Specification of behavioral anti-patterns for the verification of block-structured Collaborative Business Processes

The lack of effective controls over organizational business processes can cause serious consequences for a company's reputation and even jeopardize its existence. There is a need for continuous monitoring of controls and systematic collection and evaluation of relevant data. Compliance management is essential for ensuring that organizational business processes and supporting information system are in compliance with laws, regulations, and various legislative or technical documents pertaining to the place of business. The focus of this chapter is to provide an insight into compliance management and discuss the integration and automation of compliance management in service-driven computing. The chapter elaborates conceptual models for specifying compliance requirements originating from various sources and details aspects such as multi-view process modeling annotated with compliance requirements, annotation of service interfaces and behavioral characteristics, development and reuse of compliant process fragments, architectural patterns to simplify compliance management, and abstract frameworks to ensure compliance in the context of service-driven computing through service adaptation and runtime governance. Finally, approaches to automating compliance management through formalization of compliance requirements, rule- and event-based monitoring, and integration of compliance governance systems with automated reasoning and verification tools are detailed.

Implementation of enterprise resource planning system to support business process in organization has increased rapidly. Higher education institution is one of organizations which can use enterprise resource planning system to optimize their business process. Universitas Indonesia (UI) is one of the prominent universities in Indonesia who uses enterprise resource planning system for their financial business processes, but the adoption process has not been completed until now. This happened because there are many factors that hinder enterprise resource planning system adoption at the UI. This study combines Technology, Organization, Environment framework and Iacovou model as a guideline to analyze challenges and supporting dimension in adopting enterprise resource planning system in UI. Our research found that challenges are the fact that UI usually developed their own system, lack of communication process in organization, no regulation from government about enterprise resource planning implementation in higher education, and the perceived benefits are not satisfied employees yet. Supporting factors are the existance of good information technology infrastructure, top management support, various enterprise resource planning vendor, and the benefits is slowly felt by employee.

A distributed repository for managing business process models in cross-organizational collaborations

Academic libraries experience a lot of pressure due to rapid changes in technology, budget cuts and increasing demand of information services from their clientele. At the same time, libraries are expected to improve their information services at the global level to meet the increasing demands of libraries’ population. Therefore, an effective collaboration in academic libraries is not an option anymore, but a necessity in order to cope with the rapidly changing technologies and external pressures. Blockchain technology because of its capabilities to record transactions and digital interactions in a transparent, secure, resilient, efficient and traceable way across untrusted parties, offers new opportunities for academic libraries’ collaboration. However, due to its infancy stage of development, literature on blockchain technology adoption behavior is lacking, especially in the context of academic libraries. This therefore opens up the opportunities for further research in this area. Based on the technology innovation theory and technology-organisation-environment framework, a conceptual research model has been developed to investigate the determinant factors of intention to adopt blockchain technology in South African academic libraries’ collaborative business processes. This conceptual paper also gives directions for future research in the form of 11 hypotheses.

Industry 4.0 is a key strategic trend of the economy. Virtual factories are key building blocks for Industry 4.0 where product design processes, manufacturing processes and general collaborative business processes across factories and enterprises are integrated. In the context of EU H2020 FIRST (vF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion) project, end users of vFs are not experts in business process modelling to guarantee correct collaborative business processes for realizing execution. To enable automatic execution of business processes, verification is an important step at the business process design stage to avoid errors at runtime. Research in business process model verification has yielded a plethora of approaches in form of languages and tools that are based on Petri nets family and temporal logic. However, no report specifically targets and presents a comparative assessment of these approaches based on criteria as one we propose. In this paper we present an assessment of the most common verification approaches based on their expressibility, flexibility, suitability and complexity. We also look at how big data impacts the business process verification approach in a data-rich world.

Nowadays, as a result of the adoption of new Internet technologies like cloud computing and emerging business models, organizations are able to establish collaborative networks for executing Collaborative Business Processes (CBPs) in a flexible way. Current approaches of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) for implementing and executing CBPs have shortcomings, not only related to the services offered, but also about issues typical of the technological solution chosen, such as portability, elasticity, and privacy when they are cloud-based. Portability refers to the dependency that is created due to the heterogeneity of the services offered by different cloud providers, elasticity defines the degree to which a system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources in an autonomic manner, and privacy refers to sensitive information that is expected to be hidden from others. Then, the purpose of this work is to define an adequate cloud architecture for a CBPs management platform which faces these issues. To do so, starting from a definition of a cloud platform architecture that solves (almost all) the shortcomings for the CBPs services offered, an enhancement making use of the microservices paradigm is proposed, overcoming the identified difficulties.

Significant stochastic dependencies in process models

This paper describes the impact of blockchain on organizations in various fields of activity. In order to describe the impact in detail and correctly, the blockchain process is described, which is divided into several stages. In addition, the architecture of the blockchain technology implementation system is displayed. Due to the fact that blockchain technology correlates with other electronic centralized systems, its distinctive features are listed. Based on these features, there is a change and simplification of business processes in organizations. However, this technology has both advantages and disadvantages which will disappear over time. There are certain requirements for the blockchain, the fulfillment of which will allow creating a working version of a decentralized system. Thus, this work confirms the pos-sibility of integrating blockchain technology into various fields of activity.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a relatively new approach to automate business processes in organizations. Practitioners have adopted it extensively, notably within the accounting discipline; however, the scientific research seems to be lagging. As a result of this, there is no clear definition or uniform understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of RPA. To close this gap, we conducted a structured and systematic literature review of published scholarly articles on RPA. We set out to identify the definition of RPA, consider its feasibility regarding implementation, outline the advantages and disadvantages, and evaluate the risks and best practices of RPA. In this paper, we show that the literature has particularly failed to discuss the quantifiable benefits of RPA. The best practices identified are especially relevant for practitioners. Based on our findings, we propose an agenda for future research on RPA.