Showing papers in "International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design in 2013"

An Extension of Business Process Model and Notation for Security Risk Management

Abstract: Business process modelling is one of the major aspects in the modern information system development. Recently business process model and notation BPMN has become a standard technique to support this activity. Typically the BPMN notations are used to understand enterprise's business processes. However, limited work exists regarding how security concerns are addressed during the management of the business processes. This is a problem, since both business processes and security should be understood in parallel to support a development of the secure information systems. In the previous work we have analysed BPMN with respect to the domain model of the IS security risk management ISSRM and showed how the language constructs could be aligned to the concepts of the ISSRM domain model. In this paper the authors propose the BPMN extensions for security risk management based on the BPMN alignment to the ISSRM concepts. We illustrate how the extended BPMN could express assets, risks and risk treatment on few running examples related to the Internet store regarding the asset confidentiality, integrity and availability. Our proposal would allow system analysts to understand how to develop security requirements to secure important assets defined through business processes. The paper opens the possibility for business and security model interoperability and the model transformation between several modelling approaches if these both are aligned to the ISSRM domain model.

Empirical Evaluation of Test Driven Modeling

Abstract: Declarative approaches to process modeling are regarded well suited for highly volatile environments as they provide a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding and maintaining declarative process models impede their usage. To compensate for these shortcomings, Test Driven Modeling TDM has been proposed. This paper reports on an empirical investigation in which TDM is viewed from two different angles. First, the impact of TDM on communication is explored in a case study. Results indicate that domain experts are inclined to use test cases for communicating with the model builder system analyst and prefer them over the process model. The second part of the investigation, a controlled experiment, investigates the impact of TDM on process model maintenance. Data gathered in this experiment indicates that the adoption of test cases significantly lowers cognitive load and increases the perceived quality of changes.

A Semantic Framework for Knowledge Management in Virtual Innovation Factories

Abstract: Knowledge management is a crucial aspect for enterprises that want to effectively cope with business innovation. However, the full control of the knowledge asset is often missing due to the lack of precise organizational models, policies, and proper technologies, especially in Virtual Enterprises VEs, which are characterized by heterogeneous partners with different policies, skills and know-how. For such reasons, the need for technologies that enable knowledge sharing, efficient access to knowledge resources, and interoperability is felt as primary. This work proposes a semantics-based infrastructure aimed at supporting effective knowledge management for business innovation in VEs. Knowledge resources are formally represented and stored in a semantic layer, which is exploited by a set of semantic services for enabling efficient retrieval and reasoning capabilities to derive additional knowledge.

Control Automation to Reduce Costs of Control

Abstract: Much compliance effort concerns adherence to contracts. Parties to a contract need to make sure that the other parties will deliver. To this end they may require additional controls in the business process to monitor delivery and induce contractual penalties when needed. Controls have costs. In this paper the authors argue that introducing fully automated controls will help to reduce control costs, because i they can prevent misstatements compliance by design or ii they increase the quality of evidence and thereby reduce the audit risk for the external auditor and corresponding audit fees. The line of reasoning is illustrated by a case study of the implementation process of automated controls on the procurement process for public transport services for the elderly and disabled. This is a complex and heavily regulated domain. The case study indicates that control automation makes monitoring compliance to contracts in such complex domains feasible and that using control automation can in fact reduce the costs of control.

Gesture-Based Process Modeling Using Multi-Touch Devices

Abstract: Contemporary business process modeling tools provide menu-based user interfaces for defining and visualizing process models. Such menu-based interactions have been optimized for applications running on desktop computers, but are limited regarding their use on multi-touch devices. At the same time, the widespread use of mobile devices in daily business life as well as their multi-touch capabilities offer promising perspectives for intuitively defining and changing business process models. Additionally, multi-touch tables will foster collaborative business process modeling based on natural as well as intuitive gestures and interactions. This paper presents the results of an experiment that investigated the way users define and change business process models using multi-touch devices. Based on experiment results, a core gesture set is designed enabling the easy definition and change of business process models with multi-touch devices. Finally, a proof-of-concept implementation of this core gesture set is presented. Overall, gesture-based process modeling and multi-touch devices will foster new ways of collaborative business process modeling.

Conformance Analysis of Organizational Models: A New Enterprise Modeling Framework using Algebraic Graph Transformation

Abstract: Organizational models play a key role in today’s enterprise modeling. They usually show up as partial models produced in a distributed and non-synchronized fashion by people with different conceptual understandings. For this reason, there is a major need to organize partial organizational models within a suitable modeling framework, and, moreover, to check their mutual conformance. This builds the basis to integrate the partial organizational models later on into one holistic model of the organization and for model checking certain security, risk, and compliance constraints. In order to attain this goal, the authors present two mutually aligned contributions. The first one is a new enterprise modeling framework—the EM-Cube. The second one is a new approach for checking conformance of models based on the suggested formal modeling technique associated with the proposed framework. They evaluate the potential solution against concrete requirements derived from a real-world scenario coming out of the finance industry.

Capturing Consumer Preference in System Requirements Through Business Strategy

Abstract: A core concern within Business-IT alignment is coordinating strategic initiatives and plans with Information Systems IS. Substantial work has been done on linking strategy to requirements for IS development, but it has usually been focused on the core value exchanges offered by the business, and thus overlooking other aspects that influence the implementation of strategy. One of these, consumer preferences, has been proven to influence the successful provisioning of the business's customer value proposition, and this study aims to establish a conceptual link between both strategy and consumer preferences to system requirements. The core contention is that reflecting consumer preferences through business strategy in system requirements allows for the development of aligned systems, and therefore systems that better support a consumer orientation. The contribution of this paper is an approach to establish such alignment, with this being accomplished through the proposal of a consumer preference meta-model mapped to a business strategy meta-model further linked to a system requirements technique. The validity of this proposal is demonstrated through a case study carried out within an institution of higher education in Sweden.

A Methodology for Improving Business Process Performance through Positive Deviance

Abstract: The importance of process improvement and the role that best practice reference models play in the achievement of process improvement are both well recognized. Best practice reference models are generally created by experts who are external to the organisation. However, best practices can be implicitly derived from the work practices of actual workers within the organisation, especially when there is opportunity for variance within the work, i.e. there may be different approaches to achieve the same process goal. In this paper, the authors propose to support improvement of process performance intrinsically by utilizing the experiences and knowledge of business process users to inform and improve the current practices. The proposed methodology is inspired by the theory of positive deviance. By utilizing a multiple criteria decision making approach and Shannon's entropy method of information theory in determining useful information from uncertain data within execution log of business process, the authors are able to define the "best" and most suitable previous practices as a recommendation that fits with the current competence/experience levels of individuals. The authors demonstrate that the proposed method is capable to generate meaningful recommendations from large data sets and effectively facilitating learning within organisation leading to process performance improvement.

Applying AHP for Collaborative Modeling Evaluation: Experiences from a Modeling Experiment

Abstract: Collaborative modeling is one of the approaches used to enhance productivity in many enterprise modeling and system development projects. Determining the success of such a collaborative effort needs an evaluation of a number of factors which affect the quality of not only the end-products – the models, but also that of other modeling artifacts: the modeling language, the modeling procedure and the support tool. Although a number of quality frameworks have been developed, few of these frameworks have received practical validation and many offer little guidance about how the evaluation is operationalized. The Collaborative Modeling Evaluation (COME) framework presented in this paper offers a holistic approach to the evaluation of the four modeling artifacts. It employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a well-established method from Operations Research, to score the artifacts’ quality dimensions and to aggregate the modelers’ priorities and preferences. Results from a modeling experiment demonstrate both the theoretical and practical significance of the framework.

Exploring the Business Process Agility Issue: An Experience Report

Abstract: Business process agility has drawn the attention of numerous researchers. Whilst this research activity constitutes a useful contribution towards the attainment of business process agility, most of them focus on agility during execution phase. Therefore, although business process design is an equally important phase of the business process lifecycle the exploration of agility from the designer’s perspective has not been given the attention it deserves. In this paper, the authors discuss their point of view regarding business process agility, as it was shaped during a case study concerning medical processes. Through this study, they identified important requirements for the attainment of business process agility, which were subsequently combined into a holistic picture constituting a comprehensive suggestion for the practical realization of business process agility. The objective of this paper is to contribute to a deeper understanding of business process agility and ultimately to its practical realization through the proposed holistic solution.

Towards a Method Family Supporting Information Services Co-Creation in the Transdisciplinary Context

Abstract: Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems development facilitates the creation of new types of inter-organizational and multidisciplinary collaboration and value co-creation. Simple exchange of services between organizations evolves into the co-creation of transdisciplinary services shared by all involved partners. In this paper the authors introduce the notion of transdisciplinarity and discuss how to support information services co-creation in this new context. For this purpose, they identify and explore four main principles communication, collaboration, co-innovation, and agility to be implemented in the transdisciplinary information services co-creation-the challenges that their implementation entails and the existing approaches and techniques that support their implementation. Finally, the authors propose a method family approach as a means to create new methods including a large variability of techniques and providing configuration mechanisms. In particular, this paper demonstrates how to create a method family providing a flexible and agile process model based on the transdisciplinarity principles and allowing to combine techniques and approaches from different disciplines in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary services.

Process Evolution in a Distributed Process Execution Environment

Abstract: To allow the distribution of control and visibility of cross-organizational process models and increase availability and performance of the processes, a process model can be fragmented into logically different parts and distributed in the enterprise architecture. Fragmentation algorithms and execution environments which connect the fragmented process model parts together, recreating the original process execution semantics, have been proposed in earlier work. However, a critical challenge that is left open is the ability of the distributed process execution environment to respond effectively to process changes. In this paper, the authors describe the difficulties, advantages and issues of process model change support in a fragmented and distributed environment. Moreover, the authors propose a system which tackles the identified issues and allows the propagation and coordination of process changes at runtime in the distributed process execution architecture.

A State-Based Intention Driven Declarative Process Model

Abstract: Declarative process models support process flexibility, whose importance has been widely recognized, particularly for organizations that face frequent changes and variable stimuli from their environment. However, the currently dominant declarative approaches lack expressiveness for addressing the process context namely, environment effects and leading its execution towards a goal. This paper proposes a declarative model which addresses activities as well as states, external events, and goals. The model is based on the Generic Process Model GPM, extended by a notion of activity, which includes a state change aspect and an intentional aspect. The achievement of the intention of an activity may depend on events in the environment and is hence not certain. The paper provides a formalization of the model and describes an execution mechanism. It emphasizes the usefulness of specifying the intentional aspect of activities, by using it as a basis for semantic validation of the model at design time and for a planning module that can guide execution at runtime. These are illustrated by an example from the medical domain.

Financial Evaluation and Optimization of Business Processes

Abstract: Designing and optimizing a Business Process based on its financial parameters is a challenging task which requires well defined approaches, actions and recommendations which when implemented lead to tangible and quantifiable results. In this paper the authors consider Business Processes represented through the Business Process Modeling Notation with their Costs evaluated through a pattern based methodology. Using this concept of Cost calculation the authors analyze the effect of different well known best practices on the financial parameters of the process. In this study the authors also evaluate the impact of each task in a process on the overall Cost through Sensitivity Analysis leading to a structured approach to parameter variation to achieve financial optimization. The study briefly introduces the Business Process Modeling Notation, Workflow Patterns, and available Performance Measures Evaluation Techniques and recommends an adaptation of Devils Quadrangle suitable for impact evaluation.

From Frequent Features to Frequent Social Links

Abstract: Standard data mining techniques have been applied and adapted for eliciting knowledge from social networks, by achieving classical tasks such as classification, search for frequent patterns or link prediction. Most works have exploited only the network topological structure, and therefore cannot be used to answer questions involving nodes features. For instance, the frequent pattern discovery task generally refers to the search for sub-networks frequently found in a single network or in a set of networks. In the same area, this paper focuses on the concept of frequent link that stands as a regularity found in a network on links between node groups that share common characteristics. The extraction of such links from a social network is a particularly challenging and computationally intensive problem, since it is much dependent on the number of links and attributes. In this study, the authors propose a solution for reducing the search space of frequent links, by filtering the nodes features on a criterion of frequency. The authors make the assumption that frequent links occur between sets of features that are themselves frequent. This property is used to reduce the search space and speed up the extraction process. The authors empirically show that it is well founded, and they discuss the efficiency of the solution in terms of computation time and number of frequent patterns found depending on several frequency thresholds.

E-CARe: A Process for Engineering Ubiquitous Information Systems

Abstract: Ubiquity in Information Systems ISs is a new requirement widely expressed by customers and users due to emerging and evolving communication and mobile technologies. Each IS should support a set of mobile applications used either to interact smartly with the changing environment, to provide adaptive services to customers or both. Designing ISs with highly technological risks requires a precise and appropriate development process. However, such processes fail to consider ubiquitous requirements throughout the development process. This paper tries to solve this issue by proposing a process for identifying and modeling ubiquitous requirements that can be integrated into an existing IS engineering process. This process, called E-CARe, focuses on adapting to the surrounding context; this requires detailed specification and analysis work by a context designer. E-CARe uses an event-driven logic, as dynamicity and reactivity are the major properties required from ubiquitous applications. A Model-Driven Engineering MDE approach is used to automate specification work. In order to test the process, a case study from the intelligent transport domain is applied as an illustration.

Representation of Situational Methods: Incorporating ISO/IEC 24744 into a Domain-Based Framework

Abstract: Method Engineering ME and Situational Method Engineering SME aim at providing effective solutions for building and supporting evolution of software and information systems development methods. For this purpose, method components are specified and composed into general-purpose development methods or situational methods, i.e., development methods that best fit the characteristics of a given project and its environment. Recently ISO/IEC 24744 has emerged for defining a metamodel and a notation for development methods. However, this standard lacks a systematic support for situational classification and maintenance. In this work, the authors suggest incorporating ISO/IEC 24744 metamodel into a domain-based framework, called Application-based DOmain Modeling for Method Engineering ADOM-ME, which supports specifying both general-purpose and situational methods in a single, simple, accessible, and scalable frame of reference. An exploratory study on the usability of ADOM-ME indicates that the approach can be utilized by information systems students that represent non-experienced method engineers and software developers.

Guest editorial preface : special Issue from BPMDS’2011: making BPM Theories Work in Practice

Abstract: Guest editorial preface : special Issue from BPMDS’2011: making BPM Theories Work in Practice

Functional Method Engineering

Abstract: Examination of the notion of situation shows that it does not reflect so much the method characteristics as the characteristics of projects/method implementations. By treating methods as functions the authors are able to postulate functional characteristics of methods. By including these in the description of a situation, they are able to describe the functional aspects of a situation. This functional situation can be used for retrieving functionally similar methods. Functional similarity is abstracted out in the notion of functional method. That is, a functional situation gives to the authors a functional method which can correspond to one or more methods. Each method is retrieved and it is then adapted to yield the desired method. Since they rely so heavily on the notion of a function, the authors refer to their approach as functional method engineering. The implications of the approach on CAME tool design are considered and illustrated through a running example.