Clone Detection in Repositories of Business Process Models

Business process model repositories capture precious knowledge about an organization or a business domain. In many cases, these repositories contain hundreds or even thousands of models and they represent several man-years of effort. Over time, process model repositories tend to accumulate duplicate fragments, as new process models are created by copying and merging fragments from other models. This calls for methods to detect duplicate fragments in process models that can be refactored as separate subprocesses in order to increase readability and maintainability. This paper presents an indexing structure to support the fast detection of clones in large process model repositories. Experiments show that the algorithm scales to repositories with hundreds of models. The experimental results also show that a significant number of non-trivial clones can be found in process model repositories taken from industrial practice.

Fragment-based version management for repositories of business process models

As organizations reach higher levels of Business Process Management maturity, they tend to accumulate large collections of process models. These repositories may contain thousands of activities and be managed by different stakeholders with varying skills and responsibilities. However, while being of great value, these repositories induce high management costs. Thus, it becomes essential to keep track of the various model versions as they may mutually overlap, supersede one another and evolve over time. We propose an innovative versioning model and associated storage structure, specifically designed to maximize sharing across process model versions, and to automatically handle change propagation. The focal point of this technique is to version single process model fragments, rather than entire process models. Indeed empirical evidence shows that real-life process model repositories have numerous duplicate fragments. Experiments on two industrial datasets confirm the usefulness of our technique.

Business process management education in academia: Status, challenges, and recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise.

Clone detection in repositories of business process models

As organizations reach to higher levels of business process management maturity, they often find themselves maintaining repositories of hundreds or even thousands of process models, representing valuable knowledge about their operations. Over time, process model repositories tend to accumulate duplicate fragments (also called clones) as new process models are created or extended by copying and merging fragments from other models. This calls for methods to detect clones in process models, so that these clones can be refactored as separate subprocesses in order to improve maintainability. This paper presents an indexing structure to support the fast detection of clones in large process model repositories. The proposed index is based on a novel combination of a method for process model decomposition (specifically the Refined Process Structure Tree), with established graph canonization and string matching techniques. Experiments show that the algorithm scales to repositories with hundreds of models. The experimental results also show that a significant number of non-trivial clones can be found in process model repositories taken from industrial practice.

Automated error correction of business process models

As order dependencies between process tasks can get complex, it is easy to make mistakes in process model design, especially behavioral ones such as deadlocks. Notions such as soundness formalize behavioral errors and tools exist that can identify such errors. However these tools do not provide assistance with the correction of the process models. Error correction can be very challenging as the intentions of the process modeler are not known and there may be many ways in which an error can be corrected. We present a novel technique for automatic error correction in process models based on simulated annealing. Via this technique a number of process model alternatives are identified that resolve one or more errors in the original model. The technique is implemented and validated on a sample of industrial process models. The tests show that at least one sound solution can be found for each input model and that the response times are short.

The phenomenon of business process management : practitioners’ emphasis

Since 2005, Business Process Management (BPM) has been one of the top 10 issues for CIO’s. However, while there is a general awareness what BPM is and what it relates to, one needs to ask ‘does everyone have the same understanding of the BPM phenomenon? And if not, is there a pattern to these conceptions and how do the ways of conceptualizing BPM differ?’ This paper presents the practitioner conceptions of BPM using a phenomenographic approach to detect variations in the BPM conceptions emphasised. 26 interviews were conducted with BPM practitioners with various scopes of work (namely program management, project management and execution levels) in this qualitative research. Distinct variations in how BPM is conceptualized among BPM practitioners are revealed, showing that emphasis is put depending on their scope of work either towards value generation, improvement or managing processes. This is of particular relevance to the Information Systems and BPM community in order to align the rigorous work done to date by the research community with the current understanding of BPM in the practitioner community.

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.

Fragment-based version management for repositories of business process models

As organizations reach higher levels of Business Process Management maturity, they tend to accumulate large collections of process models. These repositories may contain thousands of activities and be managed by different stakeholders with varying skills and responsibilities. However, while being of great value, these repositories induce high management costs. Thus, it becomes essential to keep track of the various model versions as they may mutually overlap, supersede one another and evolve over time. We propose an innovative versioning model, and associated storage structure, specifically designed to maximize sharing across process models and process model versions, reduce conflicts in concurrent edits and automatically handle controlled change propagation. The focal point of this technique is to version single process model fragments, rather than entire process models. Indeed empirical evidence shows that real-life process model repositories have numerous duplicate fragments. Experiments on two industrial datasets confirm the usefulness of our technique.

Business Process Management (BPM) education in Australia : a critical review based on content analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) is a top priority in organisations and is rapidly proliferating as an emerging discipline in practice. However, the current studies show lack of appropriate BPM skilled professionals in the field and a dearth of opportunities to develop BPM expertise. This paper analyses the gap between available BPM-related education in Australia and required BPM capabilities. BPM courses offered by Australian universities and training institutions have been critically analysed and mapped against leading BPM capability frameworks to determine how well current BPM education and training offerings in Australia actually address the core capabilities required for BPM professionals. The outcomes reported here can be used by Australian universities and training institutions to better align and position their training materials to the BPM required capabilities. It could also be beneficial to individuals looking for a systematic and in-depth understanding of BPM capabilities and trainings.

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.

Applying social technology to Business Process Lifecycle Management

In recent years social technologies such as wikis, blogs or microblogging have seen an exponential growth in the uptake of their user base making this type of technology one of the most significant networking and knowledge sharing platforms for potentially hundreds of millions of users. However, the adoption of these technologies has been so far mostly for private purposes. First attempts have been made to embed features of social technologies in the corporate IT landscape, and Business Process Management is no exception. This paper aims to consolidate the opportunities for integrating social technologies into the different stages of the business process lifecycle. Thus, it contributes to a conceptualization of this fast growing domain, and can help to categorize academic and corporate development activities.

Empirical research in business process management : introduction to the special issue

In this editorial letter, we provide the readers of Information Systems and e-Business Management with an introduction to Business Process Management and the challenges of empirical research in this field. We then briefly describe selected examples of current research efforts in this fields and how the papers accepted for this special issue contribute to extending our body of knowledge.