Business Process Management (BPM) research resulted in a plethora of methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This survey aims to structure these results and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in BPM. In BPM the concept of a process model is fundamental. Process models may be used to configure information systems, but may also be used to analyze, understand, and improve the processes they describe. Hence, the introduction of BPM technology has both managerial and technical ramifications and may enable significant productivity improvements, cost savings, and flow-time reductions. The practical relevance of BPM and rapid developments over the last decade justify a comprehensive survey.

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Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey

Model-driven engineering

Aligning Observed and Modeled Behavior The availability of process models and event logs is rapidly increasing as more and more business processes are supported by IT. On the one hand, most organizations make substantial efforts to document their processes, while on the other hand, these processes leave footprints in their information systems. Although it is possible to extract event logs from today’s systems, the relation between event logs and process models is often identified using heuristics that may yield misleading insights. In this thesis, techniques to align event logs and process models are explored. Based on the obtained alignments, various analysis techniques are developed. The techniques are evaluated against both artificial and real-life process models and event logs. A memory-efficient technique to compute alignments between event logs and process models has been developed. Given an event log and a process model, low-level deviations, i.e., observed activities that are not allowed according to the model and the other way around, are explicitly identified. The technique can also be used to identify high-level deviations such as swapped and replaced activities. Our technique is applied to problems occurring in different domains. Unlike earlier approaches, alignment-based conformance checking techniques are shown to be robust against peculiarities of process models, such as duplicate and invisible tasks. Alignmentbased conformance metrics, such as fitness and precision, are shown to be more intuitive and can deal with multiple level of noise in event logs. Various visualizations of alignments provide powerful diagnostics to identify the context of frequently occurring deviations between process executions and prescribed process models. Applying data mining techniques to alignments yields root causes of deviations between the observed behavior in an event log and the modeled behavior in a process model. Alignments also improve the robustness of performance measurements based on event logs and process models, even if the logs are deviating from the models. From a computational point of view, computing alignments is extremely expensive. However, the obtained results indicate that alignments not only provide a theoretically solid basis for analysis based on both models and process executions, but are also able to handle problems of real-life complexity.

Aligning observed and modeled behavior

Enterprise information systems state of the art

Vendor lock-in is a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to the lack of standardization. Current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem are predominantly technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Consequently, most customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. This paper provides a critical analysis of the vendor lock-in problem, from a business perspective. A survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted in this study has identified the main risk factors that give rise to lock-in situations. The analysis of our survey of 114 participants shows that, as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud, the vendor lock-in problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, the findings exemplify the importance of interoperability, portability and standards in cloud computing. A number of strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contracts, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding standard data structures and APIs, developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in.

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Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective

This chapter is intended to provide an overview and introduction to the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). We will describe BPMN and its historic development. In addition, we will provide the general context and usage of BPMN, layered upon the technical details defined in the BPMN 2.0 Specification. The basics of the BPMN notation will be described—that is, the types of graphical shapes, their purpose, and how they work together as part of a Business Process Model/Diagram. Also discussed will be the different uses of BPMN diagram types, including how levels of precision affect what a modeler will include in a diagram. Finally, the value in using BPMN as a standard notation will be defined.

Stephen White

Papers

Business Process Model and Notation—BPMN