RDBPM 2011 Abstracts

Full Papers Short Papers
Full Papers
Paper Nr: 8
Title:

A METHOD FOR DISCOVERING THE RELEVANCE OF EXTERNAL CONTEXT VARIABLES TO BUSINESS PROCESSES
Authors:

Eduardo Costa Ramos, Flavia Maria Santoro and Fernanda Baião
Abstract: Organizations have been demanded to efficiently detect and respond to changes in their environment, which depends on its ability to adapt their business processes. Taking internal and external environment variables into account enables to address issues, such as, how a business process was executed last time the country experienced a similar economic scenario; whether that process execution brought positive results or not; which were the external environmental reasons that provoked changes in previous process executions. These environmental variables are typically referred in the literature as the context of the process. In this paper, we propose a method to identify and prioritize external variables that impact the execution of specific activities of a process. The proposed method applies competitive intelligence concepts and data mining techniques, and was evaluated in a case study.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 3
Title:

DEFINING INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS - Using Business Process Modeling for Incident Response for Chemical Facilities
Authors:

Stephen C. Fortier and Gregory L. Shaw
Abstract: The chemical industry is responsible for process management safety at all of its facilities, especially those that have off-site consequences in the event of an unplanned release. This research is analyzing the current practices for emergency response for chemical facilities and will provide a model that could be utilized by small or large chemical facilities. Business process modeling was used to capture information requirements of extant incident response for chemical facilities. It will determine what technologies, specifically software and information systems, could be utilized to improve the chemical facility emergency response mechanism. The results will provide an optimal process model for an improved solution for an emergency response mechanism. This research-in-progress will produce a model emergency response mechanism, represented in a business process model, for a typical chemical facility.
Paper Nr: 4
Title:

BUSINESS PROCESSES AND ORGANISATIONS - Challenges and Opportunities Towards a People-centric Approach
Authors:

Nuno Pina Gonçalves and José António S. Pereira
Abstract: Currently with the evolution of collaborative platforms, the focus is on people. The patterns of communication and collaboration are increasing and referring to social computing. BPM (Business Process Management) seeks to adopt tools and wider social skills members, including business experts. All these activities involve a strong interaction between ranges of stakeholders, who collaborate in order to obtain a common goal. This raises the question of how to adopt a systematic set of methodologies studied in the fields of social sciences in order to improve the productivity of teamwork. This paper emphasis the BPM human perspective and presents a case study focused in collaboration platforms enabling the collective knowledge through the exchange of social capital in collaborative environments.
Paper Nr: 5
Title:

MANAGING INSIGHTS: A REPOSITORY FOR PROCESS ANALYTICS, OPTIMIZATION AND DECISION SUPPORT
Authors:

Florian Niedermann, Holger Schwarz and Bernhard Mitschang
Abstract: The success of many large businesses depends on quality of their business processes. Consequently, there are numerous approaches to the analysis and the optimization of these processes. The focus of most of these approaches is, however, on the generation and monitoring of basic metrics, such as the process duration. Further, analysis results are typically considered to be ”one-off” efforts, without giving too much thought to reuse. Together, these two factors can have a negative impact on the business process quality, as improvements are either not discovered at all or might be not considered when the context changes. To address this issue, this paper presents an insight-oriented process repository that centrally captures insights based on standardized metrics, data integration and mining methods as well as graph analysis algorithms. The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated in an application to process optimization.
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Paper Nr: 6
Title:

USING INFORMATION OF AN INFORMAL NETWORK TO EVALUATE BUSINESS PROCESS ROBUSTNESS
Authors:

Malika Grim-Yefsah, Camille Rosenthal-Sabroux and Virginie Thion-Goasdoué
Abstract: We consider the evaluation of a business process quality, in particular the evaluation of its robustness. By robustness, we mean robustness w.r.t. the risk of loosing knowledge of persons implied in the business process. We define metrics taking tacit knowledge into account. These metrics are based on the analysis of a social network underlying the process execution. We illustrate these metrics on a –real– application case: the evaluation of an IS project management business process.
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Paper Nr: 7
Title:

AN APPROACH TO A GRAPHICAL QUERY EDITOR - For Ontology-based Knowledge Management
Authors:

Markus Schwinn, Norbert Kuhn and Stefan Richter
Abstract: The OnToBau research project aims to provide a way to classify, archive and effectively use business knowledge with the assistance of an ontology-based knowledge archive for small and medium companies of the construction industry. This archive is intended to proactively provide users with information which will assist them in their daily business process handling. The targeted system consists of four main parts. In this paper we mainly discuss a component for querying ontologies easily. We claim that such a component should allow graphical queries in order to be suitable for non-experienced users in our application domain and we present our approach to a visual query system and sketch how this can be embedded in the worker’s environment. This graphical interface will allow a knowledge worker to actively search for information in an ontology and is a first step to a personal agent.
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