Collaboration features in current BPM tools

In cross-organizational, distributed environments, Business Process Management requires collaborative technologies to facilitate the process of discovering, modeling, and improving business processes across geographical and organizational boundaries. This paper provides a comprehensive understanding of collaborative business process modeling that is based on a review of literature and a case study of three selected modelling tools. The application of the framework reveals that current process modeling tools consider different perspectives on collaboration, and that the included features are orthogonal. This paper informs practitioners about the state of the art in tool support for collaborative process modelling. It also informs vendors about opportunities to enhance the technology support. For research, our paper paper informs social aspects of BPM technology through its explicit focus on the collaboration of BPM stakeholders in the process of distributed modeling.

A prototype augmented reality collaborative process modelling tool

Identifying, modelling and documenting business processes usually requires the collaboration of many stakeholders that may be spread across companies in inter-organizational business settings. While there are many process modelling tools available, the support they provide for remote collaboration is still limited. This demonstration showcases a novel prototype application that implements collaborative virtual environment and augmented reality technologies to improve remote collaborative process modelling, with an aim to assisting common collaboration tasks by providing an increased sense of immersion in an intuitive shared work and task space. Our tool is easily deployed using open source software, and commodity hardware, and is expected to assist with saving money on travel costs for large scale process modelling projects covering national and international centres within an enterprise.

Evaluation of an Augmented Reality Collaborative Process Modelling System

Identifying, modelling and documenting business processes usually requires the collaboration of many stakeholders that may be spread across companies in inter-organizational business settings. While there are many process modelling tools available, the support they provide for remote collaboration is still limited. This paper investigates the application of virtual environment and augmented reality technologies to remote business process modelling, with an aim to assisting common collaboration tasks by providing an increased sense of immersion in a shared workspace. We report on the evaluation of a prototype system with five key informants. The results indicate that this approach to business process modelling is suited to remote collaborative task settings, and stakeholders may indeed benefit from using augmented reality interfaces.

Improving remote collaborative process modelling using embodiment in 3D virtual environments

Identifying, modelling and documenting business processes usually require the collaboration of many stakeholders that may be spread across companies in inter-organizational settings. While modern process modelling technologies are beginning to provide a number of features to support remote, they lack support for visual cues used in co-located collaboration. In this paper, we examine the importance of visual cues for collaboration tasks in collaborative process modelling. Based on this analysis, we present a prototype 3D virtual world process modelling tool that supports a number of visual cues to facilitate remote collaborative process model creation and validation. We then report on a preliminary analysis of the technology. In conclusion, we proceed to describe the future direction of our research with regards to the theoretical contributions expected from the evaluation of the tool.

Gartner Surface Process Modelling movie

AR process modelling movie presented at Gartner BPM Summit in Sydney, August, 2011. Video showing us using the MS Surface at QUT to perform collaborative process modelling.

Augmented Reality Process Modelling Tool

Video presented as part of BPM2011 demonstration(France). In this video we show a prototype BPMN process modelling tool which uses Augmented Reality techniques to increase the sense of immersion when editing a process model. The avatar represents a remotely logged in user, and facilitates greater insight into the editing actions of the collaborator than present 2D web-based approaches in collaborative process modelling. We modified the Second Life client to integrate the ARToolkit in order to support pattern-based AR.

Formative evaluation for improving collaborative planning : a case study at the regional scale

In an earlier paper (Cameron & Johnson 2004) we introduced the idea of formative evaluation (or evaluation for development), the purpose of which is to provide information for improving planning programs and activities. This type of evaluation differs from the two other types: outcome evaluation which aims to judge the success or otherwise of a program; and evaluation for knowledge which seeks to contribute to theoretical work on planning processes and activities. In the earlier paper we also outlined the first stage of formative evaluation in the SEQ 2021 regional planning exercise showing how the process of planning for community engagement was modified in light of the evaluation findings. This current paper details the second stage of formative evaluation in which the collaborative planning component of SEQ 2021 was evaluated, as such it further demonstrates how formative evaluation can be used to improve planning programs. The evaluation findings also provide insights into strategies for more effective collaborative planning. We begin with an overview of collaborative approaches to regional planning, including the SEQ 2021 regional planning program. We then outline formal and informal evaluations of various collaborative regional planning exercises, including the predecessor of SEQ 2021 - SEQ 2001. This sets the scene for discussion of the approach used to evaluate the collaborative component of SEQ 2021. After outlining the main findings from the evaluation and the ways these findings were used to refine the collaborative planning process we conclude with a series of recommendations, relevant not only to SEQ 2021 but to other collaborative planning exercises

Flexible process graph : a prologue

Businesses document their operational processes as process models. The common practice is to represent process models as directed graphs. The nodes of a process graph represent activities and directed edges constitute activity ordering constraints. A flexible process graph modeling approach proposes to generalize process graph structure to a hypergraph. Obtained process structure aims at formalization of ad-hoc process control flow. In this paper we discuss aspects relevant to concurrent execution of process activities in a collaborative manner organized as a flexible process graph. We provide a real world flexible process scenario to illustrate the approach.

Virtual business role-play : leveraging familiar environments to prime stakeholder memory during process elicitation

Business process models have traditionally been an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach for process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions as they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. Empirical data obtained in this study suggests that this approach may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.

Testing a framework for the quality of process models: A case study

Process modeling can be regarded as the currently most popular form of conceptual modeling. Research evidence illustrates how process modeling is applied across the different information system life cycle phases for a range of different applications, such as configuration of Enterprise Systems, workflow management, or software development. However, a detailed discussion of critical factors of the quality of process models is still missing. This paper proposes a framework consisting of six quality factors, which is derived from a comprehensive literature review. It then presents in a case study, a utility provider, who had designed various business process models for the selection of an Enterprise System. The paper summarizes potential means of conducting a successful process modeling initiative and evaluates the described modeling approach within the Guidelines of Modeling (GoM) framework. An outlook shows the potential lessons learnt, and concludes with insights to the next phases of this study.

IT service desk process improvement : a narrative style case study

This paper is a detailed case narrative on how a Faculty of a leading Australian University conducted a rigorous process improvement project, applying fundamental Business Process Management (BPM) concepts. The key goal was to increase the efficiency of the faculty’s service desk. The decrease of available funds due to reducing student numbers and the ever increasing costs associated with service desk prompted this project. The outcomes of the project presented a set of recommendations which leads to organizational innovation having information technology as an enabler for change. The target audience includes general BPM practitioners or academics who are interested in BPM related case studies, and specific organisations who might be interested in conducting BPM within their service desk processes.

A Framework of Issues in Large Process Modelling Projects

As process management projects have increased in size due to globalised and company-wide initiatives, a corresponding growth in the size of process modeling projects can be observed. Despite advances in languages, tools and methodologies, several aspects of these projects have been largely ignored by the academic community. This paper makes a first contribution to a potential research agenda in this field by defining the characteristics of large-scale process modeling projects and proposing a framework of related issues. These issues are derived from a semi -structured interview and six focus groups conducted in Australia, Germany and the USA with enterprise and modeling software vendors and customers. The focus groups confirm the existence of unresolved problems in business process modeling projects. The outcomes provide a research agenda which directs researchers into further studies in global process management, process model decomposition and the overall governance of process modeling projects. It is expected that this research agenda will provide guidance to researchers and practitioners by focusing on areas of high theoretical and practical relevance.

Using ontology for the representational analysis of process modelling techniques

Selecting an appropriate business process modelling technique forms an important task within the methodological challenges of a business process management project. While a plethora of available techniques has been developed over the last decades, there is an obvious shortage of well-accepted reference frameworks that can be used to evaluate and compare the capabilities of the different techniques. Academic progress has been made at least in the area of representational analyses that use ontology as a benchmark for such evaluations. This paper reflects on the comprehensive experiences with the application of a model based on the Bunge ontology in this context. A brief overview of the underlying research model characterizes the different steps in such a research project. A comparative summary of previous representational analyses of process modelling techniques over time gives insights into the relative maturity of selected process modelling techniques. Based on these experiences suggestions are made as to where ontology-based representational analyses could be further developed and what limitations are inherent to such analyses.

The Order Fulfillment Process Model

This appendix describes the Order Fulfillment process followed by a fictitious company named Genko Oil. The process is freely inspired by the VICS (Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Solutions) reference model1 and provides a demonstration of YAWL’s capabilities in modelling complex control-flow, data and resourcing requirements.