Extending Workflows for Knowledge Flow Automation

Effective execution of business processes also requires the provisioning of relevant knowledge to workers in various business contexts. Knowledge flow automation aims to enable seamless transfer of knowledge by supporting the capture and sharing of organizational knowledge related to business processes. Given the strong correlation between the flow of work and the flow of knowledge, workflow systems are a natural platform for supporting knowledge flow. However, existing workflow technology does not yet provide the needed mechanisms suitable for supporting knowledge flow. This chapter presents an overview of different types of workflow-based knowledge management systems that provide knowledge workers with the required knowledge while supporting the flow of work. In addition, a new perspective is presented on extending workflows to support knowledge transfer processes by introducing the concept of “knowledge workflows” and outline future research directions in this area.

Model-based Validation of Business Processes

Validation should be done in the context of understanding how a business process is intended to contribute to the business strategies of an organization. Validation can take place along a variety of dimensions including legal compliance, financial cost, customer value, and service quality. A business process modeling tool cannot anticipate all the ways in which a business process might need to be validated. However, it can provide a framework for extending model elements to represent context for a business process. It can also support information exchange to facilitate validation with other tools and systems. This chapter demonstrates a model-based approach to validation using a hospital approval process for accessing patient data in a data warehouse. An extensible meta-model, a flexible data exchange layer, and linkage between business processes and enterprise context are shown to be the critical elements in model-based business process validation.

Business Process Management and Six Sigma

In this chapter, the authors establish the existence of a synergistic relationship between two complementary methodologies, Business Process Management (BPM) and Six Sigma, through literature review and suggest methods to exploit the same. Six Sigma provides incremental improvement through its analytical abilities and is complemented by BPM which provides the data from the ongoing processes on a real time basis. The authors discuss two perspectives on how to synergize these methodologies. Firstly, achieve hybrid BPM-Six Sigma by substituting Improve and Manage steps of BPM with the DMAIC of Six Sigma methodology. Secondly, utilize Six Sigma methodology for analysis on data generated by BPM. The application of the integration of BPM and Six Sigma is presented through case studies from financial services companies. The authors also present the key features of BPM tools that can assist Six Sigma in every phase of its implementation.

Business-Oriented Process Management

This paper highlights all the relevant issues and required features from a business operation point of view. It presents an overall intelligent business operation scenario to highlight the required tasks and relevant issues to meet the needs of business managers and business operators. It then outlines the approaches and design to deal with these issues and provides the needed functionality. Finally, it summarizes the study and discusses future work.

Specification and Performance Characteristics of Scientific Grid Workflows

Grid computing promises to enable a scalable, reliable, and easy-to-use computational infrastructure for e-Science. To materialize this promise, Grids need to provide full automation of the entire development and execution cycle starting with application modeling and specification, continuing with experiment design and management, and ending with the collection and analysis of results. Often, this automation relies on the execution of workflow processes. Not much is known much about Grid workflow characteristics, scalability, and workload, which hampers the development of new techniques and algorithms, and slows the tuning of existing ones. This chapter describes techniques developed in the ASKALON project for modeling and analyzing the executions of scientific workflows in Grid environments. The authors first outline the architecture, services, and tools developed by ASKALON and then introduce a new systematic scalability analysis technique to help scientists understand the most severe sources of performance losses that occur when executing scientific workflows in heterogeneous Grid environments. A method for analyzing workload traces is presented, focusing on the intrinsic and environment-related characteristics of scientific workflows. The authors illustrate concrete results that validate the methods for a variety of real-world applications modeled as scientific workflows and executed in the Austrian Grid environment.

On Flexibility in Business Process Management Systems

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide the necessary infrastructure for managing business processes, in both intra-organizational and inter-organizational contexts. These process support systems also provide the technical support for managing changes in business processes, either at design time or run-time. Consequently, it is necessary for a BPMS to be flexible and amenable to changes at various levels. This chapter highlights key dimensions along which process support systems such as BPMS can be made more flexible, provides an overview of the existing body of knowledge on these dimensions, and motivates the future work in this direction. The intention is to provide the reader a strong starting point for either conducting a more detailed literature study or pursuing further research along any of these dimensions.

Business Process Portfolio Management

Business process portfolio management is an emerging field of research and practice, opening the door to new and ever more exciting process-oriented modes of management, tracking, planning, and knowledge management. This paper focuses on the strategic alignment of strategic, social, processual, and technical factors as enablers of business process portfolio development and management, and highlights the linkages associated with the alignment and integration of these factors. The authors also pose a combination of key questions and decision criteria that may be taken into account when planning and structuring business process portfolio initiatives.

Building Semantic Business Process Space for Agile and Efficient Business Processes Management

Current practices of BPM suffer from the several fundamental problems, including difficulty with automatic discovery and the integration of business processes across organizations. Many studies uncovered that the main cause of these problems lies in insufficient semantics on business processes and suggested semantic business process management (SBPM) as a solution. Although building semantic business process space (SBPS) must be at the core of the SBPM approach to resolving the problems, most research on SBPM hardly deal with it seriously. Thus, this research shows how to build SBPS by incorporating semantics with business processes. The authors first illustrate the idea of building SBPS by defining a variety of generic and specific business process ontologies for the limited area of sales order process. They then explain how the SBPS satisfies the requirements for successful implementation of SBPM and demonstrate with a scenario how SBPM can be realized in the environment of SBPS for the agile and efficient BPM.

Business Process Management in Financial Services

This chapter examines the context, benefits, and challenges of applying business process management (BPM) to financial services. First, it reviews how processes and technology have evolved in the financial services industry, and identifies how BPM technologies can improve efficiency and profitability of financial institutions. Next, the chapter discusses the strategic benefits that BPM can provide. Agile development of new business ideas, standardization and reuse of processes, and management of business environment complexity are three strategic benefits that are explored. Finally, practical concerns related to applying BPM in banks are examined along with approaches for overcoming common challenges. The observations and analysis presented are based on experiences implementing BPM projects for financial institutions based in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Integrating and Measuring Business and Technology Services in the Context of Enterprise Architecture

The main goal of this chapter is to analyse the relationship between business value-adding processes and technology solutions (integration of business/processes and technology through service structures), and to guide measurement, control, and optimisation efforts of organisations based on the enterprise service structure. To achieve these goals is to develop an enterprise architecture model that includes business and IT services, business and IT processes, and measurement possibilities.