Current initiatives in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) strive for the development of a BPM standard notation by pushing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). However, such a proposed standard notation needs to be carefully examined. Ontological analysis is an established theoretical approach to evaluating modelling techniques. This paper reports on the outcomes of an ontological analysis of BPMN and explores identified issues by reporting on interviews conducted with BPMN users in Australia. Complementing this analysis we consolidate our findings with previous ontological analyses of process modelling notations to deliver a comprehensive assessment of BPMN.

Do process modelling techniques get better? A comparative ontological analysis of BPMN

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

Business Process Management: A Survey

Literature on business process compliance (BPC) has predominantly focused on the alignment of the regulatory rules with the design, verification and validation of business processes. Previously surveys on BPC have been conducted with specific context in mind; however, the literature on BPC management research is largely sparse and does not accumulate a detailed understanding on existing literature and related issues faced by the domain. This survey provides a holistic view of the literature on existing BPC management approaches, and categories them based on different compliance management strategies in the context of formulated research questions. A systematic literature approach is used where search terms pertaining keywords were used to identify literature related to the research questions from scholarly databases. From initially 183 papers, we selected 79 papers related to the themes of this survey published between 2000{2015. The survey results reveal that mostly compliance management approaches center around three distinct categories namely: design-time (28%), run-time (32%) and auditing (10%). Also, organisational and internal control based compliance management frameworks (21%) and hybrid approaches make (9%) of the surveyed approaches. Furthermore, open research challenges and gaps are identified and discussed with respect to the compliance problem.

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Are we done with business process compliance: state of the art and challenges ahead

There is a global consensus on the need to reduce our collective carbon footprint. While much research attention has focused on developing alternative energy sources, automotive technologies or waste disposal techniques, we often ignore the fact that the ability to optimize (existing) operations to reduce their emissions impact is fundamental to this exercise. Business process management (BPM) technology, with its focus on understanding, modelling and improving/optimizing business processes, is a key starting point. Process modelling technology has applications beyond what we would traditionally describe as business processes - we can also model and improve manufacturing and other "physical" processes. This paper describes the contours of the emerging research landscape in green business process management and presents some early results in this area.

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Green business process management: a research agenda

Balanced Scorecard Diagnostics -- Maintaining Maximum Performance

A key challenge in devising solutions to a range of problems associated with business process management: process life cycle management, compliance management, enterprise process architectures etc. is the problem of identifying process semantics. The current industry standard business process modeling notation, BPMN, provides little by way of semantic description of the effects of a process (beyond what can be conveyed via the nomenclature of tasks and the decision conditions associated with gateways). In this paper, we describe the conceptual underpinnings, design, implementation and evaluation of the ProcessSEER tool that supports several strategies for obtaining semantic effect descriptions of BPMN process models, without imposing an overly onerous burden of using formal specification on the analyst. The tool requires analysts to describe the immediate effects of each task. These are then accumulated in an automated fashion to obtain cumulative effect annotations for each task in a process. The tool leverages domain ontologies wherever they are available. The tool permits the analyst to specify immediate effect annotations in a practitioner-accessible controlled natural language, which enables formal specification using a limited repertoire of natural language sentence formats. The tool also leverages semantic web services in a similar fashion.

/pdf/process-seer-a-tool-for-semantic-effect-annotation-of-422q3nj69p.pdf

Process SEER: A Tool for Semantic Effect Annotation of Business Process Models

Strategic alignment is a mechanism by which an organization can visualize the relationship between its business processes and strategies. It enables organizational decision makers to collect meaningful insights based on their current processes. Currently it is difficult to show the sustainability of an organization and to determine an optimal set of processes that are required for realizing strategies. Further, there is not a general framework for strategic alignment that can ease this problem. In this article, we propose such a general framework for strategic alignment, which helps develop a clear understanding of the relationships between strategies and business processes. The framework gives organizations an understanding of the relationship between a set of processes and the realization of a set of strategies; it also shows the optimal set of processes that can achieve these strategies.

/pdf/strategic-alignment-of-business-processes-56ijx4c7vx.pdf

Strategic alignment of business processes

The detection of treatment conflicts between multiple treatment protocols that are co-incident is a difficult and open problem that is particularly exacerbated regarding the treatment of multiple medical conditions co-occurring in aged patients. For example, a clinical protocol for prostate cancer treatment requires the administration of androgen-suppressing medication, which may negatively interact with another, co-incident protocol if the same patient were being treated for renal disease via haemodialysis, where androgen-enhancers are frequently administered. These treatment conflicts are subtle and difficult to detect using automated means. Traditional approaches to clinical decision support would require significant clinical knowledge. In this paper, the authors present an alternative approach that relies on encoding treatment protocols via process models in BPMN and annotating these models with semantic effect descriptions, which automatically detects conflicts. This paper describes an implemented tool ProcessSEER used for semantic effect annotation of a set of 12 cancer trial protocols and depicts the machinery required to detect treatment conflicts. The authors also argue whether the semantic effect annotations of treatment protocols can be leveraged for other tasks.

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1132&context=medpapers

Kerry Hinge

Papers

Process SEER: A Tool for Semantic Effect Annotation of Business Process Models

Strategic alignment of business processes

A Framework for Detecting Interactions Between Co-Incident Clinical Processes