Construct Redundancy in Process Modeling Grammars: Improving the Explanatory Power of Ontological Analysis

Conceptual modelling supports developers and users of information systems in areas of documentation, analysis or system redesign. The ongoing interest in the modelling of business processes has led to a variety of different grammars, raising the question of the quality of these grammars for modelling. An established way of evaluating the quality of a modelling grammar is by means of an ontological analysis, which can determine the extent to which grammars contain construct deficit, overload, excess or redundancy. While several studies have shown the relevance of most of these criteria, predictions about construct redundancy have yielded inconsistent results in the past, with some studies suggesting that redundancy may even be beneficial for modelling in practice. In this paper we seek to contribute to clarifying the concept of construct redundancy by introducing a revision to the ontological analysis method. Based on the concept of inheritance we propose an approach that distinguishes between specialized and distinct construct redundancy. We demonstrate the potential explanatory power of the revised method by reviewing and clarifying previous results found in the literature.

Establishing design thinking : accident, program frameworks and personal practices

Distribution through electronic media provides an avenue for promotion, recognition and an outlet of display for graphic designers. The emergence of available media technologies have enabled graphic designers to extend these boundaries of their practice. In this context the designer is constantly striving for aesthetic success and is strongly influenced by the fashion and trends of contemporary design work. The designer is always in a state of inquiry, finding pathways of discovery that lead to innovation and originality that are highly valued criteria for self-evaluation. This research is based on an analysis of the designer perspective and the processes used within an active graphic design practice specializing entirely within a digital collage domain. Contemporary design methodologies were critically examined, compared and refined to reflect the self-practice of the researcher. The refined methodology may assist designers in maintaining systematic work practices, as well as promote the importance of exploration and experimentation processes. Research findings indicate some differences in the identified methodologies and the design practice of the researcher in the sense that many contemporary designers are not confined to a client-base but are self-generating design images influenced by contemporary practitioners. As well as confirming some aspects of more conventional design processes, the researcher found that accidental discoveries and the designer’s interaction with technology plays a significant part in the design process.

Distributing leadership and cultivating dialogue with collaborative EBIP

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of collaborative evidence based information practice (EBIP) as an organizational effectiveness model. Shared leadership, appreciative inquiry and knowledge creation theoretical frameworks provide the foundation for change toward the implementation of a collaborative EBIP workplace model. Collaborative EBIP reiterates the importance of gathering the best available evidence, but it differs by shifting decision-making authority from "library or employer centric" to "user or employee centric". University of Colorado Denver Auraria Library Technical Services department created a collaborative EBIP environment by flattening workplace hierarchies, distributing problem solving and encouraging reflective dialogue. By doing so, participants are empowered to identify problems, create solutions, and become valued and respected leaders and followers. In an environment where library budgets are in jeopardy, recruitment opportunities are limited and the workplace is in constant flux, the Auraria Library case study offers an approach that maximizes the capability of the current workforce and promotes agile responsiveness to industry and organizational challenges. Collaborative EBIP is an organizational model demonstrating a process focusing first on the individual and moving to the collective to develop a responsive and high performing business unit, and in turn, organization.

Profiling event logs to configure risk indicators for process delays

Risk identification is one of the most challenging stages in the risk management process. Conventional risk management approaches provide little guidance and companies often rely on the knowledge of experts for risk identification. In this paper we demonstrate how risk indicators can be used to predict process delays via a method for configuring so-called Process Risk Indicators(PRIs). The method learns suitable configurations from past process behaviour recorded in event logs. To validate the approach we have implemented it as a plug-in of the ProM process mining framework and have conducted experiments using various data sets from a major insurance company.

Building knowledge capabilities : an organisational learning approach

The communal nature of knowledge production predicts the importance of creating learning organisations where knowledge arises out of processes that are personal, social, situated and active. It follows that workplaces must provide both formal and informal learning opportunities for interaction with ideas and among individuals. This grounded theory for developing contemporary learning organisations harvests insights from the knowledge management, systems sciences, and educational learning literatures. The resultant hybrid theoretical framework informs practical application, as reported in a case study that harnesses the accelerated information exchange possibilities enabled through web 2.0 social networking and peer production technologies. Through complementary organisational processes, 'meaning making' is negotiated in formal face-to-face meetings supplemented by informal 'boundary spanning' dialogue. The organisational capacity building potential of this participatory and inclusive approach is illustrated through the example of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in San Jose, California, USA. As an outcome of the strategic planning process at this joint city-university library, communication, decision-making, and planning structures, processes, and systems were re-invented. An enterprise- level redesign is presented, which fosters contextualising information interactions for knowledge sharing and community building. Knowledge management within this context envisions organisations as communities where knowledge, identity, and learning are situated. This framework acknowledges the social context of learning - i.e., that knowledge is acquired and understood through action, interaction, and sharing with others. It follows that social networks provide peer-to-peer enculturation through intentional exchange of tacit information made explicit. This, in turn, enables a dynamic process experienced as a continuous spiral that perpetually elevates collective understanding and enables knowledge creation.

Business model experimentation : what is the role of deign-led prototyping in developing novel business models?

This book presents readers with the opportunity to fundamentally re-evaluate the processes of innovation and entrepreneurship, and to rethink how they might best be stimulated and fostered within our organizations and communities. The fundamental thesis of the book is that the entrepreneurial process is not a linear progression from novel idea to successful innovation, but is an iterative series of experiments, where progress depends on the persistence and resilience of the individuals involved, and their ability and to learn from failure as well as success. From this premise, the authors argue that the ideal environment for new venture creation is a form of “experimental laboratory,” a community of innovators where ideas are generated, shared, and refined; experiments are encouraged; and which in itself serves as a test environment for those ideas and experiments. This environment is quite different from the traditional “incubator,” which may impose the disciplines of the established firm too early in the development of the new venture.

Cost-informed operational process support

The ability to steer business operations in alignment with the true origins of costs, and to be informed about this on a real-time basis, allows businesses to increase profitability. In most organisations however, high-level cost-based managerial decisions are still being made separately from process-related operational decisions. In this paper, we describe how process-related decisions at the operational level can be guided by cost considerations and how these cost-informed decision rules can be supported by a workflow management system. The paper presents the conceptual framework together with data requirements and technical challenges that need to be addressed to realise cost-informed workflow execution. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated using a prototype implementation in the YAWL workflow environment.

Determining process model precision and generalization with weighted artificial negative events

Process mining encompasses the research area which is concerned with knowledge discovery from event logs. One common process mining task focuses on conformance checking, comparing discovered or designed process models with actual real-life behavior as captured in event logs in order to assess the “goodness” of the process model. This paper introduces a novel conformance checking method to measure how well a process model performs in terms of precision and generalization with respect to the actual executions of a process as recorded in an event log. Our approach differs from related work in the sense that we apply the concept of so-called weighted artificial negative events towards conformance checking, leading to more robust results, especially when dealing with less complete event logs that only contain a subset of all possible process execution behavior. In addition, our technique offers a novel way to estimate a process model’s ability to generalize. Existing literature has focused mainly on the fitness (recall) and precision (appropriateness) of process models, whereas generalization has been much more difficult to estimate. The described algorithms are implemented in a number of ProM plugins, and a Petri net conformance checking tool was developed to inspect process model conformance in a visual manner.

Investigating the success of operational business process management systems

Business process management systems (BPMS) belong to a class of enterprise information systems that are characterized by the dependence on explicitly modeled process logic. Through the process logic, it is relatively easy to manage explicitly the routing and allocation of work items along a business process through the system. Inspired by the DeLone and McLean framework, we theorize that these process-aware system features are important attributes of system quality, which in turn will elevate key user evaluations such as perceived usefulness, and usage satisfaction. We examine this theoretical model using data collected from four different, mostly mature BPM system projects. Our findings validate the importance of input quality as well as allocation and routing attributes as antecedents of system quality, which, in turn, determines both usefulness and satisfaction with the system. We further demonstrate how service quality and workflow dependency are significant precursors to perceived usefulness. Our results suggest the appropriateness of a multi-dimensional conception of system quality for future research, and provide important design-oriented advice for the design and configuration of BPMSs.

Simplifying process model abstraction : techniques for generating model names

The increased adoption of business process management approaches, tools and practices, has led organizations to accumulate large collections of business process models. These collections can easily include hundred to thousand models, especially in the context of multinational corporations or as a result of organizational mergers and acquisitions. A concrete problem is thus how to maintain these large repositories in such a way that their complexity does not hamper their practical usefulness as a means to describe and communicate business operations. This paper proposes a technique to automatically infer suitable names for business process models and fragments thereof. This technique is useful for model abstraction scenarios, as for instance when user-specific views of a repository are required, or as part of a refactoring initiative aimed to simplify the repository’s complexity. The technique is grounded in an adaptation of the theory of meaning to the realm of business process models. We implemented the technique in a prototype tool and conducted an extensive evaluation using three process model collections from practice and a case study involving process modelers with different experience.

Improving business process models using observed behavior

Process-aware information systems (PAISs) can be configured using a reference process model, which is typically obtained via expert interviews. Over time, however, contextual factors and system requirements may cause the operational process to start deviating from this reference model. While a reference model should ideally be updated to remain aligned with such changes, this is a costly and often neglected activity. We present a new process mining technique that automatically improves the reference model on the basis of the observed behavior as recorded in the event logs of a PAIS. We discuss how to balance the four basic quality dimensions for process mining (fitness, precision, simplicity and generalization) and a new dimension, namely the structural similarity between the reference model and the discovered model. We demonstrate the applicability of this technique using a real-life scenario from a Dutch municipality.

Approaches to creativity : how adolescents engage in the creative process

Despite growing recognition of creativity's importance for young people, the creativity of adolescents remains a neglected field of study. Hence, grounded theory research was conducted with 20 adolescents from two Australian schools regarding their self-reported experiences of creativity in diverse domains. Four approaches to the creative process – adaptation, transfer, synthesis, and genesis – emerged from the research. These approaches used by students across a range of domains contribute to the literature in two key ways: (a) explaining how adolescents engage in the creative process, theorised from adolescent creators’ self-reports of their experiences and (b) confirms hybrid theories that recognise that creativity has elements of both domain-generality and domain-specificity. The findings have educational implications for both students and teachers. For students, enhancing metacognitive awareness of their preferred approaches to creativity was reported as a valuable experience in itself, and might also enable adolescents to expand their creativity through experimenting with other ways of engaging in the creative process. For teachers, using these understandings to underpin their pedagogies can promote metacognitive awareness and experimentation, and also provide teachers with a framework for assessing students’ creative processes.

Business process variability modeling : A survey

It is common for organizations to maintain multiple variants of a given business process, such as multiple sales processes for different products or multiple bookkeeping processes for different countries. Conventional business process modeling languages do not explicitly support the representation of such families of process variants. This gap triggered significant research efforts over the past decade leading to an array of approaches to business process variability modeling. This survey examines existing approaches in this field based on a common set of criteria and illustrates their key concepts using a running example. The analysis shows that existing approaches are characterized by the fact that they extend a conventional process mod- eling language with constructs that make it able to capture customizable process models. A customizable process model represents a family of process variants in a way that each variant can be derived by adding or deleting fragments according to configuration parameters or according to a domain model. The survey puts into evidence an abundance of customizable process modeling languages, embodying a diverse set of con- structs. In contrast, there is comparatively little tool support for analyzing and constructing customizable process models, as well as a scarcity of empirical evaluations of languages in the field.

The impact of organisational culture in project selection process : case of public infrastructure project in Indonesia

The thesis develops an Organisational Culture (OC) based framework for potentially improving the current practice of the infrastructure project selection process (PSP) in Indonesia, particularly for regional road projects. This framework is developed to address the suggestion emanating from the research that there is a need for strengthening the relevant organisational culture dimensions and making changes to current organisational culture profiles to support the effectiveness of the decision-making process of the current PSP. The findings not only benefit existing knowledge but also provide practical contributions for those decision-makers within the Indonesian regional government that are involved in PSP, i.e. by raising the awareness of the influence and the role of organisational culture.

Supporting context-aware process design : learnings from a design science study

Recent studies have started to explore context-awareness as a driver in the design of adaptable business processes. The emerging challenge of identifying and considering contextual drivers in the environment of a business process are well understood, however, typical methods and models for business process design do not yet consider this context. In this paper, we describe our work on the design of a method framework and appropriate models to enable a context-aware process design approach. We report on our ongoing work with an Australian insurance provider and describe the design science we employed to develop innovative and useful artifacts as part of a context-aware method framework. We discuss the utility of these artifacts in an application in the claims handling process at the case organization.