Fundamentals of business process management

Encompasses the whole BPM lifecycle, including process identification, modelling, analysis, redesign, automation and monitoring Class-tested textbook complemented with additional teaching material on the accompanying website Covers both relevant conceptual background, industrial standards and actionable skills Business Process Management (BPM) is the art and science of how work should be performed in an organization in order to ensure consistent outputs and to take advantage of improvement opportunities, e.g. reducing costs, execution times or error rates. Importantly, BPM is not about improving the way individual activities are performed, but rather about managing entire chains of events, activities and decisions that ultimately produce added value for an organization and its customers. This textbook encompasses the entire BPM lifecycle, from process identification to process monitoring, covering along the way process modelling, analysis, redesign and automation. Concepts, methods and tools from business management, computer science and industrial engineering are blended into one comprehensive and inter-disciplinary approach. The presentation is illustrated using the BPMN industry standard defined by the Object Management Group and widely endorsed by practitioners and vendors worldwide. In addition to explaining the relevant conceptual background, the book provides dozens of examples, more than 100 hands-on exercises – many with solutions – as well as numerous suggestions for further reading. The textbook is the result of many years of combined teaching experience of the authors, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as in the context of professional training. Students and professionals from both business management and computer science will benefit from the step-by-step style of the textbook and its focus on fundamental concepts and proven methods. Lecturers will appreciate the class-tested format and the additional teaching material available on the accompanying website fundamentals-of-bpm.org.

Identifying the triggers for management services in business transformation management

Business transformations are complex organisational change endeavours that result in a business performing current work differently, or performing different work. Information Technology (IT) is a key enabler of such initiatives, but comes with its challenges, as revamping the IT infrastructure in large-scale organisations implies high complexity, high risk, and often high failure rates. We view business transformations as a collection of management services that are demanded and enacted at a program level, defined as abstract resources that provide the managerial capabilities necessary for business transformations. In this research-in-progress, we explore what triggers the need for management services in response to the challenges in business transformation management. We analyse data from two exploratory case studies using the critical incident technique as our qualitative analysis method. Early findings indicate that management service triggers reside on either the strategic level, which may be internally or externally driven, or at the program management level, which may be situational, influential or reactional. We detail implications for our on-going research.

A design pattern for integration of business process management systems

A cross-domain workflow application may be constructed using a standard reference model such as the one by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [7] but the requirements for this type of application are inherently different from one organization to another. The existing models and systems built around them meet some but not all the requirements from all the organizations involved in a collaborative process. Furthermore the requirements change over time. This makes the applications difficult to develop and distribute. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based approaches such as the BPET (Business Process Execution Language) intend to provide a solution but fail to address the problems sufficiently, especially in the situations where the expectations and level of skills of the users (e.g. the participants of the processes) in different organisations are likely to be different. In this paper, we discuss a design pattern that provides a novel approach towards a solution. In the solution, business users can design the applications at a high level of abstraction: the use cases and user interactions; the designs are documented and used, together with the data and events captured later that represents the user interactions with the systems, to feed an intermediate component local to the users -the IFM (InterFace Mapper) -which bridges the gaps between the users and the systems. We discuss the main issues faced in the design and prototyping. The approach alleviates the need for re-programming with the APIs to any back-end service thus easing the development and distribution of the applications

Defining failure in the nonprofit organization: The case of four human service agencies

Private nonprofit human service organizations provide a spectrum of services that aim to resolve societal problems. Their failure may leave needed and desired services unprovided or not provided sufficiently to meet public demand. However, the concept of organizational failure has not been examined for the nonprofit organization. This research addresses the deficiency in the literatures of organization failure and nonprofit organizations.^ An eight category typology, developed from a review of the current literature and findings from expert interviews, is initially presented to define nonprofit organization failure. A multiple case study design is used to test the typology in four nonprofit human service delivery agencies. The case analysis reduces the typology to five types salient to nonprofit organization failure: input failure, legitimacy failure, adaptive failure, management failure and leadership failure.^ The resulting five category typology is useful to both theory builders and nonprofit practitioners. For theory development, the interaction of the failure types extends the literature and lays a foundation for a theory of nonprofit organization failure that diffuses management and leadership across all of the failure types, highlights management and leadership failure as collective functions shared by paid staff and the volunteer board of directors, and emphasizes the importance of organization legitimacy.^ From a practical perspective, the typology provides a tool for diagnosing failure in the nonprofit organization. Using the management indicators developed for the typology, a checklist of the warning signals of potential failure, emphasizing the key types of management and leadership, offers nonprofit decision makers a priori examination of an organization's propensity for failure. ^

Variables affecting the success of older applicants for employment in a public organization: An age -cued cognitive model of administrative decision-making

The dissertation takes a multivariate approach to answer the question of how applicant age, after controlling for other variables, affects employment success in a public organization. In addition to applicant age, there are five other categories of variables examined: organization/applicant variables describing the relationship of the applicant to the organization; organization/position variables describing the target position as it relates to the organization; episodic variables such as applicant age relative to the ages of competing applicants; economic variables relating to the salary needs of older applicants; and cognitive variables that may affect the decision maker's evaluation of the applicant. ^ An exploratory phase of research employs archival data from approximately 500 decisions made in the past three years to hire or promote applicants for positions in one public health administration organization. A logit regression model is employed to examine the probability that the variables modify the effect of applicant age on employment success. A confirmatory phase of the dissertation is a controlled experiment in which hiring decision makers from the same public organization perform a simulated hiring decision exercise to evaluate hypothetical applicants of similar qualifications but of different ages. The responses of the decision makers to a series of bipolar adjective scales add support to the cognitive component of the theoretical model of the hiring decision. A final section contains information gathered from interviews with key informants. ^ Applicant age has tended to have a curvilinear relationship with employment success. For some positions, the mean age of the applicants most likely to succeed varies with the values of the five groups of moderating variables. The research contributes not only to the practice of public personnel administration, but is useful in examining larger public policy issues associated with an aging workforce. ^

Business continuity management in airports : securing continuity in the face of crisis

This thesis investigated both the potential for Business Continuity Management to enhance organisational reliability, and appropriate levels of Business Continuity Management capability resident in a number of Australian international and regional airports. Findings indicated that a host of regulatory and business processes including Business Continuity Management can assist in creating reliability in aviation infrastructure systems in Australia. Further, the thesis developed a multi-level maturity assessment framework for defining the depth of implementation of Business Continuity Management capabilities in airports, along with other recommendations to improve functional reliability of airport operations.

Essays on Personal Bankruptcy Law and Small Business Financing

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

An online assessment and development tool for business incubators:optimising business-incubation management practice, performance and impact, Project Report

This project is focused on exchanging knowledge between ABS, UKBI and managers of business incubators in the UK. The project relates to exploitation of extant knowledge-base on assessing and improving business incubation management practice and performance and builds on two earlier studies. It addresses a pressing need for assessing and benchmarking business incubation input, process and outcome performance and highlighting best practice. The overarching aim of this project was to obtain proof-of-concept for a business incubation performance assessment and benchmarking online tool, fine-tune it and put it in use by nurturing a community of business incubation management practice, aligned by the resultant tool. The purpose was to offer an appropriate set of measures, in areas identified by relevant research on business incubation performance management and impact as critical, against which: 1.The input and process performance of business incubation management practice can be assessed and benchmarked within the auspices of a community of incubator managers concerned with best practice 2.The outcome performance and impact of business incubators can be assessed longitudinally. As such, the developed online assessment framework is geared towards the needs of researchers, policy makers and practitioners concerned with business incubation performance, added value and impact.

SPSS step by step - essentials for social and political science

No abstract available

Papers and proceedings of the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association.

No meetings held 1914-1929.

Supreme Emergencies and the protection of non-combatants in war

Is it ever justifiable to target non-combatants deliberately? This article assesses Michael Walzer's claim that the deliberate targeting of non-combatants may be justifiable during 'supreme emergencies', a view that has received some support but that has elicited little debate. It argues that the supreme emergencies exception to the prohibition on targeting non-combatants is problematic for at least four reasons. First, its utilitarianism contradicts Walzer's wider ethics of war based on a conception of human rights. Second, the exception may undermine the principle of non-combatant immunity. Third, it is based on a historical fallacy. Finally, it is predicated on a strategic fallacy-the idea that killing noncombatants can win wars. The case for rejecting the exception, however, has been opposed by those who persuasively argue that it is wrong to tie leaders' hands when they confront supreme emergencies. The final part of the article addresses this question and suggests that the principle of proportionality may give political leaders room for manoeuvre in supreme emergencies without permitting them deliberately to target non-combatants.

50 years of the Australian journal of political science

2015 marks the 50 year anniversary of the journal we now know as the Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS). The Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) was established in 1956 and for a decade provided members with ‘a cyclostyled quarterly (newsletter), carrying articles, reviews and news and notes’ (Marchant 1966: 1). In 1965, at its annual conference the Association decided to change its name to include the adjective ‘Australasian’ ‘in order to take into account the increasing participation in APSA activities by political scientists in New Zealand’ (Marchant 1966: 1). The Association also decided to replace the newsletter with a new journal, Politics, a title it retained until 1990, when it became the AJPS.1 The secretary of AJPS, P.D. Marchant, expressed the aspirations for the new journal in the first ‘Foreword’.