Object-Aware Business Processes

Author(s):  
Vera Künzle ◽  
Barbara Weber ◽  
Manfred Reichert

Despite the increasing maturity of process management technology not all business processes are adequately supported by it. Support for unstructured and knowledge-intensive processes is missing, especially since they cannot be straight-jacketed into predefined activities. A common characteristic of these processes is the role of business objects and data as drivers for process modeling and enactment. This paper elicits fundamental requirements for effectively supporting such object-aware processes; i.e., their modeling, execution, and monitoring. Imperative, declarative, and data-driven process support approaches are evaluated and how well they support object-aware processes are investigated. A tight integration of process and data as major steps towards further maturation of process management technology is considered.

Author(s):  
Vera Künzle ◽  
Barbara Weber ◽  
Manfred Reichert

Despite the increasing maturity of process management technology not all business processes are adequately supported by it. Support for unstructured and knowledge-intensive processes is missing, especially since they cannot be straight-jacketed into predefined activities. A common characteristic of these processes is the role of business objects and data as drivers for process modeling and enactment. This paper elicits fundamental requirements for effectively supporting such object-aware processes; i.e., their modeling, execution, and monitoring. Imperative, declarative, and data-driven process support approaches are evaluated and how well they support object-aware processes are investigated. A tight integration of process and data as major steps towards further maturation of process management technology is considered.


Author(s):  
Rüdiger Pryss ◽  
Steffen Musiol ◽  
Manfred Reichert

Process management technology constitutes a fundamental component of any service-driven computing environment. Process management facilitates both the composition of services at design-time and their orchestration at runtime. In particular, when applying the service paradigm to enterprise integration, high flexibility is required. In this context, atomic as well as composite services representing the business functions should be quickly adaptable to cope with dynamic business changes. Furthermore, they should enable mobile and quick access to enterprise information. The growing maturity of smart mobile devices has fostered their prevalence in knowledge-intensive areas in the enterprise as well. As a consequence, process management technology needs to be extended with mobile task support. However, process tasks, hitherto executed in a stationary manner, cannot be simply transferred to run on smart mobile devices. Many research groups focus on the partitioning of processes and the distributed execution of the resulting fragments on smart mobile devices. Opposed to this fragmentation concept, this chapter proposes an approach to enable the robust and flexible execution of single process tasks on smart mobile devices by provisioning self-healing techniques to address the smooth integration of mobile tasks with business processes.


Author(s):  
Rüdiger Pryss ◽  
Steffen Musiol ◽  
Manfred Reichert

Process management technology constitutes a fundamental component of any service-driven computing environment. Process management facilitates both the composition of services at design-time and their orchestration at runtime. In particular, when applying the service paradigm to enterprise integration, high flexibility is required. In this context, atomic as well as composite services representing the business functions should be quickly adaptable to cope with dynamic business changes. Furthermore, they should enable mobile and quick access to enterprise information. The growing maturity of smart mobile devices has fostered their prevalence in knowledge-intensive areas in the enterprise as well. As a consequence, process management technology needs to be extended with mobile task support. However, process tasks, hitherto executed in a stationary manner, cannot be simply transferred to run on smart mobile devices. Many research groups focus on the partitioning of processes and the distributed execution of the resulting fragments on smart mobile devices. Opposed to this fragmentation concept, this chapter proposes an approach to enable the robust and flexible execution of single process tasks on smart mobile devices by provisioning self-healing techniques to address the smooth integration of mobile tasks with business processes.


Author(s):  
Dominik Birkmeier ◽  
Sabine Buckl ◽  
Andreas Gehlert ◽  
Florian Matthes ◽  
Christian Neubert ◽  
...  

In the public sector, Information Technology (IT) as a means to support governmental processes is as important as in industry today. Delivering high quality eGovernment services requires an efficient and effective IT support. This IT support can only be provided if the requirements specified in the processes are correctly and completely transformed into IT solutions. Services are seen as major means to support this transformation. In this chapter, the authors propose a method which systematically translates business processes into services. The method contains 1) a data model describing the structure of the work products of the method, 2) a technique for emergent data modeling, which allows its users to customize the data model according to the government’s needs, 3) a role model describing the required competencies for each step, and 4) a process model describing the required steps to derive services from business processes. To succeed in a governmental context with diverse, federative organizational structures, the method needs a high degree of flexibility. In particular, the proposed method has been designed to be compatible with different process modeling techniques.


Author(s):  
Paz Perez González ◽  
Jose M. Framinan

A business process can be defined as a set of related tasks that are carried out within a business or organization in order to obtain certain output that should add value for the business client or organization (Gunasekaran & Kobu, 2002). An enterprise can be then analyzed and integrated through its business processes. Thus, business process modeling (BPM) becomes a fundamental part of business process management, as it enables a common understanding and analysis of a company’s business processes. Particularly, BPM using computer-aided design tools and a standard visual form of notation to describe, validate, and simulate business processes has taken on a new importance (Jonah, 2002).


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-237
Author(s):  
Hannu Hannila ◽  
Joni Koskinen ◽  
Janne Harkonen ◽  
Harri Haapasalo

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse current challenges and to articulate the preconditions for data-driven, fact-based product portfolio management (PPM) based on commercial and technical product structures, critical business processes, corporate business IT and company data assets. Here, data assets were classified from a PPM perspective in terms of (product/customer/supplier) master data, transaction data and Internet of Things data. The study also addresses the supporting role of corporate-level data governance. Design/methodology/approach The study combines a literature review and qualitative analysis of empirical data collected from eight international companies of varying size. Findings Companies’ current inability to analyse products effectively based on existing data is surprising. The present findings identify a number of preconditions for data-driven, fact-based PPM, including mutual understanding of company products (to establish a consistent commercial and technical product structure), product classification as strategic, supportive or non-strategic (to link commercial and technical product structures with product strategy) and a holistic, corporate-level data model for adjusting the company’s business IT (to support product portfolio visualisation). Practical implications The findings provide a logical and empirical basis for fact-based, product-level analysis of product profitability and analysis of the product portfolio over the product life cycle, supporting a data-driven approach to the optimisation of commercial and technical product structure, business IT systems and company product strategy. As a virtual representation of reality, the company data model facilitates product visualisation. The findings are of great practical value, as they demonstrate the significance of corporate-level data assets, data governance and business-critical data for managing a company’s products and portfolio. Originality/value The study contributes to the existing literature by specifying the preconditions for data-driven, fact-based PPM as a basis for product-level analysis and decision making, emphasising the role of company data assets and clarifying the links between business processes, information systems and data assets for PPM.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 688-706 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kratzer ◽  
Patrick Lohmann ◽  
Maximilian Roeglinger ◽  
Lea Rupprecht ◽  
Michael zur Muehlen

Purpose The design and execution of business processes are important drivers of organizational performance. Organizations design their operations around cross-functional processes adopting business process management (BPM) methods, tools and systems. This often involves assigning BPM accountability to senior executives such as the chief operating officer (COO), chief information officer (CIO), or chief technology officer (CTO). Some organizations appoint a chief process officer (CPO), a phenomenon raising important questions about the skills and responsibilities of this position within the top management team. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical study to explore the skills and responsibilities of CPOs and differences to other executives. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted an exploratory content analysis of job resumes from LinkedIn.com to investigate the skills and careers of individuals appointed as COO, CIO, CTO and CPO in organizations from different industries and sizes. The content analysis was complemented with expert interviews of CPOs to obtain rich insights into their perception of the responsibilities of this position. Findings CPOs possess a unique skill set to serve as change agents. Their skills enable them to serve as integrators and influencers across managerial ranks and corporate functions. COOs, CIOs and CTOs possess more specialized skills related to their corporate function, whereas CPOs are more generalists who facilitate process-oriented strategy and execution, driving cultural change throughout the organization. These findings are consistent across industry and size. Originality/value This is the first paper to examine the CPO position in relation to other senior executive positions. Hence, it addresses an important gap in the BPM literature which can help organizations to make informed decisions whether they need a CPO position or have it become a part-time role of one of their existing C-level positions.


1995 ◽  
Vol 04 (02n03) ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
VOLKER GRUHN

Most of today’s approaches to business process engineering (also called business process management) start from an activity-centered perspective. They describe activities to be carried out within a business process and their relationships, but they usually pay little attention to the objects manipulated within processes. In this article, we discuss an approach to business process modeling, model analysis, and business process enaction (also called workflow management) which is based on data modeling, activity modeling, and organization modeling. In fact, the ℒeu approach to business process management considers data models (describing types of objects to be manipulated in a business process and their relationships), activity models (describing activities to be carried out in a business process), and organization models (describing organizational entities involved in a business process) as separate, but equally important, facets of business processes.


Author(s):  
Witold Abramowicz ◽  
Agata Filipowska ◽  
Monika Kaczmarek ◽  
Tomasz Kaczmarek

Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) bridges the gap between business and IT by taking advantage of the Semantic Web technologies. The foundation for SBPM is the detailed ontological description of enterprise models. These models encompass also business processes taking place in enterprises. Within this chapter, we show how the process-oriented knowledge may be captured for the needs of SBPM. For this reason, we describe semantically enhanced Business Process Modeling Notation (sBPMN) being a conceptualization of one of the main process modeling notations with the fast growing popularity among the tool vendors, namely BPMN. The sBPMN ontology is based on the BPMN specification and may be used as a serialization format by the BPMN modeling tools, thus, making creation of annotations invisible to users. In this chapter, we also present an example of a process model description.


Author(s):  
Matthias Kloppmann ◽  
Dieter Koenig ◽  
Simon Moser

This chapter introduces a set of languages intended to model and run business processes. The Business Process Modeling Notation 1.1 (BPMN) is a notation used to graphically depict business processes. BPMN is able to express choreographies, i.e. the cooperation of separate, autonomous business processes to jointly achieve a larger scenario. Since BPMN is only a notation, there is no specification for a meta-model that allows rendering BPMN choreographies into an executable form. This chapter describes how the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) help to close that gap. BPMN, SCA and WS-BPEL can jointly be used and combined to model, deploy and execute business process choreographies. We will also integrate the related BPEL4People specification, since BPMN allows human ‘user tasks’, but WS-BPEL focuses only on automated business process. The authors argue that, based on these specifications, the dichotomy between modeling and execution can be addressed efficiently. In this chapter, we will show that a key aspect of the future of Business Process Management is to combine graphical modeling (via BPMN) with a precise specification of an executable business process (via WS-BPEL and related standards).


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