Business Process Model and Notation

About: Business Process Model and Notation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9038 publications have been published within this topic receiving 190712 citations. The topic is also known as: Business Process Modeling Notation & BPMN.

Service Portfolio Measurement: Evaluating Financial Performance of Service-Oriented Business Processes

Abstract: Service-oriented architectures offer promising means to flexibly organize business processes. At the same time, new challenges for management arise in order to realize these potentials. Given the technological opportunities, these challenges essentially lie in choosing the right mix of services on the basis of an appropriate infrastructure supporting value adding activities. In order to support this management perspective, a focus on service-oriented business processes is suggested in this article. Hence, a shift from technical aspects of designing service-oriented information systems to economic aspects of using them according to business needs is drawn. For this purpose, findings on the evaluation of financial performance of service-oriented business processes are presented in this paper. The objective is to develop a measurement system for decision support on the con-figuration of a company’s service portfolio reflecting specific economic conditions relevant in a certain situation. Following a design science approach, general principles of a measurement system are worked out and structured in a comprehensive framework. Then, the application of a corresponding system is presented with a practical study. Finally, perspectives on the specification and implementation of the system are sketched.

Pockets of Creativity in Business Processes

Abstract: Creative processes, for instance, the development of visual effects or computer games, increasingly become part of the agenda of information systems researchers and practitioners. Such processes get their managerial challenges from the fact that they comprise both well-structured, transactional parts and creative parts. The latter can often not be precisely specified in terms of control flow, required resources, and outcome. The processes’ high uncertainty sets boundaries for the application of traditional business process management concepts, such as process automation, process modeling, process performance measurement, and risk management. Organizations must thus exercise caution when it comes to managing creative processes and supporting these with information technology. This, in turn, requires a profound understanding of the concept of creativity in business processes. In response to this, the present paper introduces a framework for conceptualizing creativity within business processes. The conceptual framework describes three types of uncertainty and constraints as well as the interrelationships among these. The study is grounded in the findings from three case studies that were conducted in the film and visual effects industry. Moreover, we provide initial evidence for the framework’s validity beyond this narrow focus. The framework is intended to serve as a sensitizing device that can guide further information systems research on creativity-related phenomena.

A visual token-based formalization of BPMN 2.0 based on in-place transformations

Abstract: Context: The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard informally defines a precise execution semantics. It defines how process instances should be updated in a model during execution. Existing formalizations of the standard are incomplete and rely on mappings to other languages. Objective: This paper provides a BPMN 2.0 semantics formalization that is more complete and intuitive than existing formalizations. Method: The formalization consists of in-place graph transformation rules that are documented visually using BPMN syntax. In-place transformations update models directly and do not require mappings to other languages. We have used a mature tool and test-suite to develop a reference implementation of all rules. Results: Our formalization is a promising complement to the standard, in particular because all rules have been extensively verified and because conceptual validation is facilitated (the informal semantics also describes in-place updates). Conclusion: Since our formalization has already revealed problems with the standard and since the BPMN is still evolving, the maintainers of the standard can benefit from our results. Moreover, tool vendors can use our formalization and reference implementation for verifying conformance to the standard.

User interface derivation from business processes: a model-driven approach for organizational engineering

Abstract: This paper defines a model-driven approach for organizational engineering in which user interfaces of information systems are derived from business processes. This approach consists of four steps: business process modeling in the context of organizational engineering, task model derivation from the business process model, task refinement, and user interface model derivation from the task model. Each step contributes to specify and refine mappings between the source and the target model. In this way, each model modification could be adequately propagated in the rest of the chain. By applying this model-driven approach, the user interfaces of the information systems are directly meeting the requirements of the business processes and are no longer decoupled from them. This approach has been validated on a case study in a large bank-insurance company.

Business Process Configuration in the Cloud: How to Support and Analyze Multi-tenant Processes?

Abstract: Lion's share of cloud research has been focusing on performance related problems. However, cloud computing will also change the way in which business processes are managed and supported, e.g., more and more organizations will be sharing common processes. In the classical setting, where product software is used, different organizations can make ad-hoc customizations to let the system fit their needs. This is undesirable, especially when multiple organizations share a cloud infrastructure. Configurable process models enable the sharing of common processes among different organizations in a controlled manner. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities related to business process configuration. Causal nets (C-nets) are proposed as a new formalism to deal with these challenges, e.g., merging variants into a configurable model is supported by a simple union operator. C-nets also provide a good representational bias for process mining, i.e., process discovery and conformance checking based on event logs. In the context of cloud computing, we focus on the application of C-nets to cross-organizational process mining.