scholarly journals Applying the Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model: Daily Practices and Process Modelling

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Ventura Martins ◽  
Marielba Zacarias
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Design Science ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Work Practices ◽  
Meta Model ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Lack Of Information ◽  
Behavioural Aspects

AbstractBackground: Business Process Modelling (BPM) is one of the most important phases of information system design. Business Process (BP) meta-models allow capturing informational and behavioural aspects of business processes. Unfortunately, standard BP meta-modelling approaches focus just on process description, providing different BP models. It is not possible to compare and identify related daily practices in order to improve BP models. This lack of information implies that further research in BP meta-models is needed to reflect the evolution/change in BP. Considering this limitation, this paper introduces a new BP meta-model designed by Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model (BPPAMeta-model). Our intention is to present a meta-model that addresses features related to the alignment between daily work practices and BP descriptions. Objectives: This paper intends to present a metamodel which is going to integrate daily work information into coherent and sound process definitions. Methods/Approach: The methodology employed in the research follows a design-science approach. Results: The results of the case study are related to the application of the proposed meta-model to align the specification of a BP model with work practices models. Conclusions: This meta-model can be used within the BPPAM methodology to specify or improve business processes models based on work practice descriptions.

scholarly journals Adaptive business rules framework for workflow management

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 948-971
Author(s):  
Kanana Ezekiel ◽  
Vassil Vassilev ◽  
Karim Ouazzane ◽  
Yogesh Patel
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Semantic Indexing ◽  
Business Rules ◽  
Business Process Modelling ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Content Type

Purpose Changing scattered and dynamic business rules in business workflow systems has become a growing problem that hinders the use and configuration of workflow-based applications. There is a gap in the existing research studies which currently focus on solutions that are application specific, without accounting for the universal logical dependencies between the business rules and, as a result, do not support adaptation of the business rules in real time. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach To tackle the above problems, this paper adopts a bottom-up approach, which puts forward a component model of the business process workflows and then adds business rules which have clear logical semantics. This allows incremental development of the workflows and semantic indexing of the rules which govern them during the initial acquisition. Findings The paper introduces an event-driven model for development of business workflows which is purely logic-based and can be easily implemented using an object-oriented technology, together with a model of the business rules dependencies which supports incremental semantic indexing. It also proposes a two-level inference mechanism as a vehicle for controlling the business process execution and the process of adaptation of the business rules at real time based on propagating the dependencies. Research limitations/implications The framework is strictly logical and completely domain-independent. It allows to account both synchronous and asynchronous triggering events as well as both qualitative and quantitative description of the conditions of the rules. Although our primary interest is to apply the framework to the business processes typical in the construction industry we believe our approach has much wider potential due to its strictly logical formalization and domain independence. In fact it can be used to control any business processes where the execution is governed by rules. Practical implications The framework could be applied to both large business process modelling tasks and small but very dynamic business processes like the typical digital business processes found in online banking or e-Commerce. For example, it can be used for adjusting security policies by adding the capability to adapt automatically the access rights to account for additional resources and new channels of operation which can be very interesting ion both B2C and B2B applications. Social implications The potential scope of the impact of the research reported here is linked to the wide applicability of rule-based systems in business. Our approach makes it possible not only to control the execution of the processes, but also to identify problems in the control policies themselves from the point of view of their logical properties – consistency, redundancies and potential gaps in the logics. In addition to this, our approach not only increases the efficiency, but also provides flexibility for adaptation of the policies in real time and increases the security of the overall control which improves the overall quality of the automation. Originality/value The major achievement reported in this paper is the construction of a universal, strictly logic-based event-driven framework for business process modelling and control, which allows purely logical analysis and adaptation of the business rules governing the business workflows through accounting their dependencies. An added value is the support for object-oriented implementation and the incremental indexing which has been possible thanks to the bottom-up approach adopted in the construction of the framework.

Getting the Big Picture

2003 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 324-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Balka
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Health Informatics ◽  
System Development ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Health Information System ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Organizational Level ◽  
Work Practices ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Corporate Strategies

Summary Objectives: While recognized that global actors influence health information system design, studies of health informatics have largely focused on micro politics of technology design and implementation. Here a problematic patient care information system (PCIS) is discussed in relation to federal and provincial policies and corporate strategies to demonstrate that our understanding of health informatics can be enhanced by linking micro studies of health informatics to larger macro contexts. Methods: Interviews and document study. Results: Although the extent to which federal initiatives influenced (or failed to influence) provincial and hospital initiatives remains debateable, events initiated at one level (the hospital’s decision to implement software, initiated at the organizational level) are influenced (perhaps indirectly) by developments in other contexts (federal /macro changes gave an initiative more weight; provincial initiatives such as the Labour Accord altered the industrial relations environment in which system development occurred). Conclusions: Micro-studies of work practice, invaluable in addressing interactions between technologies, users and work practices, often fail to account for the historic reach of global actors, although it is often these historic circumstances that contribute to present-day interactions between user, information system and organization, and that find expression – often indirectly – in daily work practices.

Dynamic product line for Business Process Management

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 1224-1256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto dos Santos Rocha ◽  
Marcelo Fantinato ◽  
Lucinéia Heloisa Thom ◽  
Marcelo Medeiros Eler
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Business Process Management ◽  
Process Management ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Design Science ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Dynamic Techniques

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the proposal of a Product Line (PL)-based approach for Business Process Management (BPM) projects that cover the entire BPM lifecycle and proposes integrating it with dynamic techniques still not used together. Design/methodology/approach – The authors carried out this work using the design science research methodology. The authors assessed the proposed approach using a classification procedure created through a series of specific attributes, which enables a comparison of the proposed integrated approach with related works selected from a systematic literature review. Findings – The comparative assessment has shown that the proposed approach presents the most comprehensive solution than any other similar one suggested for the same purpose, mainly in terms of the coverage of the entire BPM lifecycle and dynamic techniques. Research limitations/implications – Due to the high-level conceptual nature of the proposed approach, the authors could not evaluate it also in terms of some controlled experiment or a case study. Originality/value – The proposed approach aims at improving the management of business processes in organizations in a systematic way using concepts and techniques that exist in other areas, but not widely used together yet, such as BPM, service-oriented computing, and Software PL.

scholarly journals Aggregate Metric Model for Evaluating Business Processes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Chika Eleonu
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Modelling ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Measurement Framework ◽  
Aggregate Measure ◽  
Modelling Approaches

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a business process measurement framework for the evaluation of a corpus of business processes modelled in different business process modelling approaches. The results of the application of the proposed measurement framework will serve as a basis for choosing business process modelling approaches. Design/methodology/approach - The approach uses ideas of the Goal Question Metric (GQM) framework to define metrics for measuring a business process where the metrics answer the questions to achieve the goal. The Weighted Sum Method (WSM) is used to aggregate the measure of attributes of a business process to derive an aggregate measure, and business process modelling approaches are compared based on the evaluation of business process models created in different business process modelling approaches using the aggregate measure. Findings - The proposed measurement framework was applied to a corpus of business process models in different business process modelling approaches and is showed that insight is gained into the effect of business process modelling approach on the maintainability of a business process model. From the results, business process modelling approaches which imbibed the principle of separation of concerns of models, make use of reference or base model for a family of business process variants and promote the reuse of model elements performed highest when their models are evaluated with the proposed measurement framework. The results showed that the applications of the proposed framework proved to be useful for the selection of business process modelling approaches. Originality - The novelty of this work is in the application of WSM to integrate metric of business process models and the evaluation of a corpus of business process models created in different business process modelling approaches using the aggregate measure.

scholarly journals Synchronous gesture manipulation for collaboration and coordination of co-located Business Process Modelling

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Scholtz ◽  
Andre Calitz ◽  
Irene Snyman
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Design Science ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Business Process Modelling ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
Coordination And Collaboration

The purpose of this study was to investigate approaches (techniques and technologies) for the coordination of collaborative tasks using synchronous gesture manipulation. Business Process Modelling (BPM) tasks are often performed in teams of modellers who need to collaborate with each other in order to coordinate and integrate their individual contributions into the various process models in a co-located environment. These collaborative BPM tasks were used as a case study in order to develop the artifact (the BPM-Touch approach) as a proof of concept. The BPM-Touch approach allows for the coordination and collaboration of BPM tasks in co-located modelling teams using synchronous gesture manipulation approaches. The Design Science Research (DSR) methodology was used and several cycles of developing and evaluating the artifact took place. This paper reports on the last cycle and set of evaluations. The proposed approach was implemented in a BPM software package in order to provide empirical validation. Usability evaluations of the software were undertaken with both students and BPM professionals as participants. The empirical results of the evaluations revealed that the participants found the approach to be effective and rated the usability and satisfaction of the collaboration and gesture manipulation aspects of the software positively.

Modelling Business Processes

2011 ◽  
pp. 45-71
Author(s):  
Victor Portougal
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Management ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
Execution Phase ◽  
Monitoring Phase

The modelling of business processes is vital not only for business processmanagement, but also for implementation of enterprise systems. For example,when we look at the process life cycle introduced earlier, three of the sevenphases involve business process modelling, to a large extent. But apart fromthat, the models that are generated in these three phases are used in all the sevenphases of the business process management life cycle. The phases where thesemodels are developed are in the second phase of process modelling; and it isused in the third phase, where we do the analysis; and is used in the fourth phase,where we improve upon the as-is models, come up with the to-be models, andmodel them, using whatever tools that are available. But then, the to-be modelsthat are developed in the fourth phase are used in the process implementationphase, in the execution phase, in the monitoring phase, and even in the processidentification phase, when you think of it as a life cycle.

scholarly journals Process Innovation and Improvement Using Business Object-Oriented Process Modelling (BOOPM) Framework

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sitalakshmi Venkatraman ◽  
Ramanathan Venkatraman
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Business Performance ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Enterprise Systems ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Efficiency ◽  
Business Process Modelling ◽  
Business Object

In the past decades, a number of methodologies have been proposed to innovate and improve business processes that play an important role in enhancing the operational efficiency of an organisation in order to attain business competitiveness. Traditional business process modelling (BPM) approaches are process-centric and focus on the workflow, ignoring the data modelling aspects that are essential for today’s data-centric landscape of modern businesses. Hence, a majority of BPM initiatives have failed in several organisations due to the lack of data-driven insights into their business performance. On the other hand, the information systems of today focus more on dataflows using object-oriented modelling (OOM) approaches. Even standard OOM approaches, such as unified modelling language (UML) methods, exhibit inherent weaknesses due to their lack of formalized innovation with business objects and the dynamic control-flows of complex business processes. In addition to these issues, both BPM and OOM approaches have been augmented with an array of complex software tools and techniques which have confused businesses. There is a lack of a common generalized framework that integrates the well-formalised control-flow based BPM approach and the dataflow based OOM approach that is suitable for today’s enterprise systems in order to support organisations to achieve successful business process improvements. This paper takes a modest step to fill this gap. We propose a framework using a structured six-step business process modelling (BPM) guideline combined with a business object-oriented methodology (BOOM) in a unique and practical way that could be adopted for improving an organisation’s process efficiency and business performance in contemporary enterprise systems. Our proposed business object-oriented process modelling (BOOPM) framework is applied to a business case study in order to demonstrate the practical implementation and process efficiency improvements that can be achieved in enterprise systems using such a structured and integrated approach.

scholarly journals An Extension of BPMN Meta-model for Evaluation of Business Processes

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azeem Lodhi ◽  
Veit Küppen ◽  
Gunter Saake
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
System Development ◽  
Business Process Modeling ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Information System Development ◽  
Meta Model ◽  
Business Units

An Extension of BPMN Meta-model for Evaluation of Business ProcessesBusiness process modeling is used for better understanding and communication of company's processes. Mostly, business process modeling is discussed from the information system development perspective. Execution of a business process involves various factors (costs and time) which are important and should be represented in business process models. Controlling of business units uses post execution analysis for detection of failures for improvement. The process models conceived for information system development are not sufficient for post execution analysis. This paper focuses on the challenges of business process modeling in the post execution context. We provide a meta model for evaluation of a business process and discuss BPMN in this context. We also extend existing BPMN meta model for performance analysis of business processes. The proposed extensions are presented with the help of an example.

scholarly journals Investigating Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for Business Processes

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geert Poels ◽  
Ken Decreus ◽  
Ben Roelens ◽  
Monique Snoeck
Keyword(s):  
Requirements Engineering ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Process Management ◽  
Process Management ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Business Strategies ◽  
Business Process Modelling ◽  
Goal Modelling

Business processes are designed to execute strategies that aim at achieving organisational goals. During the last decade, several methods have been proposed that prescribe the use of goal-oriented requirements engineering techniques for supporting different business process management activities, in particular business process modelling. The integration of goal modelling and business process modelling aims at increasing the alignment between business strategies and the processes with their supporting IT systems. This new research area, which the authors call Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for Business Processes (GORE-for-BP), is developing rapidly, but without a clear conceptualization of the focus and scope of the proposed GORE-for-BP methods. Furthermore, an overview is lacking of which methods exist and what their level of maturity is. This paper therefore presents a research review of the GORE-for-BP area, with the aim of identifying relevant methods and assessing their focus, scope, and maturity. This study used Systematic Literature Review and Method Meta-Modelling as research methods to identify and evaluate the state of the GORE-for-BP research area and to propose a research agenda for directing future research in the area. Nineteen methods were identified, which is an indication of an active research area. Although some similarities were found with respect to how goal models are transformed into business process models (or vice-versa), there is also considerable divergence in modelling languages used and the extent of coverage of typical requirements engineering and business process management lifecycle phases. Furthermore, the exploitation of requirements engineering techniques in the full business process management lifecycle is currently under researched. Also, the maturity of the methods found in terms of the formalisation of the transformation activity, the elaboration of method guidelines, and the extent to which methods are validated, can be further improved.

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