What are the real costs of major trauma?

Background This economic evaluation reports the results of a detailed study of the cost of major trauma treated at Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH), Australia. Methods A bottom-up approach was used to collect and aggregate the direct and indirect costs generated by a sample of 30 inpatients treated for major trauma at PAH in 2004. Major trauma was defined as an admission for Multiple Significant Trauma with an Injury Severity Score >15. Direct and indirect costs were amalgamated from three sources, (1) PAH inpatient costs, (2) Medicare Australia, and (3) a survey instrument. Inpatient costs included the initial episode of inpatient care including clinical and outpatient services and any subsequent representations for ongoing-related medical treatment. Medicare Australia provided an itemized list of pharmaceutical and ambulatory goods and services. The survey instrument collected out-of-pocket expenses and opportunity cost of employment forgone. Inpatient data obtained from a publically funded trauma registry were used to control for any potential bias in our sample. Costs are reported in Australian dollars for 2004 and 2008. Results The average direct and indirect costs of major trauma incurred up to 1-year postdischarge were estimated to be A$78,577 and A$24,273, respectively. The aggregate costs, for the State of Queensland, were estimated to range from A$86.1 million to $106.4 million in 2004 and from A$135 million to A$166.4 million in 2008. Conclusion These results demonstrate that (1) the costs of major trauma are significantly higher than previously reported estimates and (2) the cost of readmissions increased inpatient costs by 38.1%.

Call for action : investigating the role of business process management in green IS

Sustainable practices are more than ever on the radar screen of organizations, triggered by a growing demand of the wider population towards approaches and practices that can be considered "green" or "sustainable". Our specific intent with this call for action is to immerse deeper into the role of business processes, and specifically the contributions that the management of these processes can play in leveraging the transformative power of information systems (IS) in order to create environmentally sustainable organizations. Our key premise is that business and information technology (IT) managers need to engage in a process-focused discussion to enable a common, comprehensive understanding of process, and the process-centered opportunities for making these processes, and ultimately the organization as a process-centric entity, "green". Based on a business process lifecycle model, we propose possible avenues for future research.

For the better or the worse? The impact of business idea changes on new venture performance and novelty

Should new ventures stick to their knitting once they start commercialising or should they engage in frequent changes of their business idea? In this paper we argue that new ventures still need to learn their way in the early phases of commercialisation and that changes are good, but subject to two important contingencies. First is that changes should be aimed at enhancing uniqueness, which in turn enhances new venture performance. Second is that our results show that changes have limited affect on uniqueness and performance for entrepreneurs aiming at maximising opportunities, but that changing the business idea has a significant positive impact for entrepreneurs focusing on minimising losses. Our findings indicate that entrepreneurs aiming at minimising losses may offset their initial disadvantages by engaging in a series of adaptations of the business idea to gain higher performance and a more unique product offering.

The emerging management services of business transformation management

Business transformations are large-scale organizational change programs that, evidence suggests, are often unsuccessful. Our interest is in identifying the management capabilities required for the successful execution of these projects. We advance a service-oriented view of the enterprise, which suggests that different management services need to be identified and integrated in order to execute business transformation. In order to identify those management services that require integration, we conducted an exploratory empirical study of the demand for management services in US and Asia, and we show that two archetypes of management services exist in business transformation initiatives: transactional and transformational management services. We identify the relevant set of transactional and transformational services and discuss what the demand for these services implies for the execution of business transformations.

A comparative analysis of business analysis (BA) and business process management (BPM) capabilities

Many initiatives to improve Business processes are emerging. The essential roles and contributions of Business Analyst (BA) and Business Process Management (BPM) professionals to such initiatives have been recognized in literature and practice. The roles and responsibilities of a BA or BPM practitioner typically require different skill-sets; however these differences are often vague. This vagueness creates much confusion in practice and academia. While both the BA and BPM communities have made attempts to describe their domains through capability defining empirical research and developments of Bodies of knowledge, there has not yet been any attempt to identify the commonality of skills required and points of uniqueness between the two professions. This study aims to address this gap and presents the findings of a detailed content mapping exercise (using NVivo as a qualitative data analysis tool) of the International Institution of Business Analysis (IIBA®) Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK® Guide) against core BPM competency and capability frameworks.

Performance analysis of business process models with advanced constructs

The importance of actively managing and analysing business processes is acknowledged more than ever in organisations nowadays. Business processes form an essential part of an organisation and their application areas are manifold. Most organisations keep records of various activities that have been carried out for auditing purposes, but they are rarely used for analysis purposes. This paper describes the design and implementation of a process analysis tool that replays, analyses and visualises a variety of performance metrics using a process definition and its corresponding execution logs. The replayer uses a YAWL process model example to demonstrate its capacity to support advanced language constructs.

Green IT : a matter of business and information systems engineering?

This panel discusses the impact of Green IT on information systems and how information systems can meet environmental challenges and ensure sustainability. We wish to highlight the role of green business processes, and specifically the contributions that the management of these processes can play in leveraging the transformative power of IS in order to create an environmentally sustainable society. The management of business processes has typically been thought of in terms of business improvement alongside the dimensions time, cost, quality, or flexibility – the so-called ‘devil’s quadrangle’. Contemporary organizations, however, increasingly become aware of the need to create more sustainable, IT-enabled business processes that are also successful in terms of their economic, ecological, as well as social impact. Exemplary ecological key performance indicators that increasingly find their way into the agenda of managers include carbon emissions, data center energy, or renewable energy consumption (SAP 2010). The key challenge, therefore, is to extend the devil’s quadrangle to a devil’s pentagon, including sustainability as an important fifth dimension in process change.

Risk-informed thinking in airports: the application of business continuity management in airport infrastructure

Airports worldwide represent key forms of critical infrastructure in addition to serving as nodes in the international aviation network. While the continued operation of airports is critical to the functioning of reliable air passenger and freight transportation, these infrastructure systems face a number of sources of disturbance that threaten their operational viability. Recent examples of high magnitude events include the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption (Folattau and Schofield 2010), the failure of multiple systems at the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 (Brady and Davies 2010) and the Glasgow airport 2007 terrorist attack (Crichton 2008). While these newsworthy events do occur, a multitude of lower-level more common disturbances also have the potential to cause significant discontinuity to airport operations. Regional airports face a unique set of challenges, particularly in a nation like Australia where they serve to link otherwise remote and isolated communities to metropolitan hubs (Wheeler 2005), often without the resources and political attention received by larger capital city airports. This paper discusses conceptual relationships between Business Continuity Management (BCM) and High Reliability Theory, and proposes BCM as an appropriate risk-based management process to ensure continued airport operation in the face of uncertainty. In addition, it argues that that correctly implemented BCM can lead to highly reliable organisations. This is framed within the broader context of critical infrastructures and the need for adequate crisis management approaches suited to their unique requirements (Boin and McConnell 2007).

Learning or legitimacy? an exploration of business planning amongst Australian social enterprises

In recent years, the value of business planning for new business ventures and small firms has been the subject of debate amongst entrepreneurship researchers (Brinckmann et al 2010: 24). Drawing on institutional theory, a number of writers suggest that business planning is primarily used to confer symbolic legitimacy on businesses seeking investment and engagement from external stakeholders ( Karlsson & Honig 2009; Zimmerman & Zeitz 2002; Delmar & Shane 2004). In this sense, business planning may not have any significant effects on firm learning, but may be used as evidence of good business operations in order to attract external resources. Meta-evaluation of the available empirical literature contests this proposition, finding that both the symbolic and organisational learning effects of business planning influence small firm performance (Brinckmann et al 2010: 36) While social enterprise – which we define as organisations that exist for a public or community benefit and trade to fulfill their mission - the study of social enterprise is a nascent and pre-paradigmatic area of inquiry (Nicholls 2010). As a consequence, there has been relatively little empirical analysis of the nature or effects of business planning amongst social enterprises (for two exceptions, see exploratory studies by Hynes 2009 and Bull & Crompton 2006). In this paper, we examine business planning practices amongst Australian social enterprises. Drawing on a survey of 365 social enterprises conducted in 2010 and in-depth interviews with 11 social entrepreneurs and managers from eight social enterprises, we find that social enterprises report being more actively engaged in business planning activities than their mainstream business counterparts. Our exploratory research suggests that both legitimacy and learning drive business planning amongst social enterprises, although legitimacy is the stronger driver. Our results also suggest that, as multi-stakeholder businesses led by mission, business planning can serve unique communicative and relational functions for this business type.

Managing large collections of business process models - Current techniques and challenges

Nowadays, business process management is an important approach for managing organizations from an operational perspective. As a consequence, it is common to see organizations develop collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. Such large collections of process models bring new challenges and provide new opportunities, as the knowledge that they encapsulate requires to be properly managed. Therefore, a variety of techniques for managing large collections of business process models is being developed. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the management techniques that currently exist, as well as the open research challenges that they pose.

Virtual worlds as a model-view approach to the communication of business processes models

The improvement and optimization of business processes is one of the top priorities in an organization. Although process analysis methods are mature today, business analysts and stakeholders are still hampered by communication issues. That is, analysts cannot effectively obtain accurate business requirements from stakeholders, and stakeholders are often confused about analytic results offered by analysts. We argue that using a virtual world to model a business process can benefit communication activities. We believe that virtual worlds can be used as an efficient model-view approach, increasing the cognition of business requirements and analytic results, as well as the possibility of business plan validation. A healthcare case study is provided as an approach instance, illustrating how intuitive such an approach can be. As an exploration paper, we believe that this promising research can encourage people to investigate more research topics in the interdisciplinary area of information system, visualization and multi-user virtual worlds.

Approximate clone detection in repositories of business process models

Evidence exists that repositories of business process models used in industrial practice contain significant amounts of duplication. This duplication may stem from the fact that the repository describes variants of the same pro- cesses and/or because of copy/pasting activity throughout the lifetime of the repository. Previous work has put forward techniques for identifying duplicate fragments (clones) that can be refactored into shared subprocesses. However, these techniques are limited to finding exact clones. This paper analyzes the prob- lem of approximate clone detection and puts forward two techniques for detecting clusters of approximate clones. Experiments show that the proposed techniques are able to accurately retrieve clusters of approximate clones that originate from copy/pasting followed by independent modifications to the copied fragments.

Challenges in the context-aware management of business processes : a multiple case study

Current conceptualizations of organizational processes consider them as internally optimized yet static systems. Still, turbulences in the contextual environment of a firm often lead to adaptation requirements that these processes are unable to fulfil. Based on a multiple case study of the core processes of two large organizations, we offer an extended conceptualisation of business processes as complex adaptive systems. This conceptualization can enable firms to optimise business processes by analysing operations in different contexts and by examining the complex interaction between external, contextual elements and internal agent schemata. From this analysis, we discuss how information technology can play a vital goal in achieving this goal by providing discovery, analysis, and automation support. We detail implications for research and practice.