Agnes Koschmider

Recommendation Based Process Modeling Support: Method and User Experience

Although most workflow management systems nowadays offer graphical editors for process modeling, the learning curve is still too steep for users who are unexperienced in process modeling. The efficiency of users may decrease when starting process modeling with minimal expertise and no obvious modeling support. This paper describes the first contribution towards a theoretically sound and empirically validated analysis of a recommender-based modeling support who is geared towards both novices and expert users. The idea is to interpret process descriptions as tags which describe the intention of the process. This leads us to the notion of virtual documents or signatures. Based on these signatures we provide a search interface to process models stored in a repository. Additionally the user can invoke a recommendation function during modeling time and the system automatically identifies and suggests relevant process fragments. By adding two additional criteria, the frequency of process reuse and structural correctness, we arrive at a full-fledged modeling support system, which provides an easy to use interface to the user while retaining a high fidelity to the users modeling intentions. We validated our support system with a user experiment based on real-life process models and our prototype implementation.

Social Software for Business Process Modeling

Formal models of business processes are used for a variety of purposes. But where the elicitation of the characteristics of a business process usually takes place in a collaborative fashion, the building of the final, formal process model is done mostly by a single person. This article presents the design and implementation of a Recommendation-Based Process Modeling Support System with ‘social features.’ A process builder using this system will receive recommendations to complete or edit a formal business process model on the basis of previous usage of modeling fragments by her peers. Such features potentially improve the modeling process and, as such, the modeling outcome, that is, the quality of the process model. This article also contains an evaluation of the systems usage and effectiveness, which builds on an experimental design. It is shown that process builders are inclined to follow up on the provided recommendations and that this will improve the semantical quality of the created model. However, information on peer usage of modeling fragments does not play a big role in selecting the recommendations being followed up. This article fits within a stream of research that puts emphasis on the modeling process, rather than on the model artifact.

Social Software for Modeling Business Processes

The aim of this paper is to show how the use of social networks may help users to behave as modelers they trust. Users are guided in this respect within the context of an existing Recommendation-Based Process Modeling Support System to which “social” features are added. Two kinds of social networks are used to this end: (1) a social network from a process model repository and (2) a social network from a recommendation history. The social network from process models provides an organizational view of business processes. An example of the information that could be derived from such a network is the average distance between performers who belong to part of business process that is already modeled and the ones who belong to a candidate process. A user can apply this result to complete a process model in a way that is similar to earlier selected solutions. The social network from recommendation history shows the relationship among modelers who use the recommendation system. From its usage history, social networks can be generated that express the similarity between its nodes (users). Both approaches are presented as effective ways to exploit social relationships in capturing business processes in conceptual models, one of the key activities in the BPM domain.

Advanced Social Features in a Recommendation System for Process Modeling

Social software is known to stimulate the exchange and sharing of information among peers. This paper describes how an existing system that supports process builders in completing a business process can be enhanced with various social features. In that way, it is easier for process modeler to become aware of new related content. They can use that content to create, update or extend process models that they are building themselves. The proposed way of achieving this is to allow users to generate and modify personalized views on the social networks they are part of. Furthermore, this paper describes mechanisms for propagating relevant changes between peers in such social networks. The presented work is particularly relevant in the context of enterprises that have already built large repositories of process models.

Social Software for Coordination of Collaborative Process Activities

Recently, a trend toward collaborative, on-line business process modeling can be observed that is also emphasized by several initiatives. Social software has the potential satisfying such a collaborative modeling. It provides tools to collaboratively exchange and share information resources among peers. Despite of the potential that social software has, it is insufficiently used as work resource (e.g., for help requests or partner search) due to a low integration of social software into the workflow management system. The aim of this paper is to exploit Wikis and social networks for the coordination of collaborative process activities. Wikis are suggested in order to reduce the model design phase. A technique will be introduced that allows visualizing a process model from Wiki pages. The connection of process activities with social networks supports browsing for suitable process collaborators. A coordination model will be introduced that governs the collaboration.

A quality model for mashups

Despite several years of mashup practice and research, it is still hard to find high-quality, useful mashups on the Web. While this can be partly ascribed to the low quality of the components used in the mashups or simply to the lack of suitable components, in this paper we argue that this is partly also due to the lack of suitable quality models for mashups themselves, helping developers to focus on the key aspects that affect mashup quality. Although apparently easy, we show that - if taken seriously - mashup development can be non-trivial and that it deserves an investigation that specializes current web quality assessment techniques, which are not able to cater for the specifics of mashups. In fact, we believe a mashup-specific quality model is needed.

Toward process mashups: key ingredients and open research challenges

Over the last few years, the mashup community has grown significantly, and mashup development has matured substantially compared to the initial hacking practices. Mash-ups as applications have specialized into data mashups, service mashups, or user interface mashups -- although these terms lack a common agreement on definitions -- while other types of mashups can still be identified. In fact, recently the term process mashup emerged, yet, again, its meaning is everything but clear. Intrigued by this latter idea, in this paper we try to understand what process mashups are. We identify three dimensions that distinguish process mashups from most of the current types of mashups and we show that exploring them leads to a set of new types of mashups, which are the actual basis for the development of process mashups. For each of these new types of mashups, we provide a discussion, discuss suitable application scenarios and show tool support, so as to highlight challenges and open issues.

How to detect semantic business process model variants

Precise modeling of business processes has paved the way to realize process aware information systems that include allocations of resources, communication services, or hardware devices to users. Changes in business strategies or new business opportunities may result in modifications of implemented functionalities of information systems and their underlying business process models. The result of these modifications are business process model variants. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for determining linguistic similarities between business process model variants in order to faciliate process redesign.

Improving the process of process modelling by the use of domain process patterns

The use of business process models has become prevalent in a wide area of enterprise applications. But while their popularity is expanding, concerns are growing with respect to their proper creation and maintenance. An obvious way to boost the efficiency of creating high-quality business process models would be to reuse relevant parts of existing models. At this point, however, limited support exists to guide process modellers towards the usage of appropriate model content. In this paper, a set of content-oriented patterns is presented, which is extracted from a large set of process models from the order management and manufacturing production domains. The patterns are derived using a newly proposed set of algorithms, which are being discussed in this paper. The authors demonstrate how such Domain Process Patterns, in combination with information on their historic usage, can support process modellers in generating new models. To support the wider dissemination and development of Domain Process Patterns within and beyond the studied domains, an accompanying website has been set up.

Real Support for Perspective-Compliant Business Process Design

Business process models aim on helping users with understanding and effectively executing business processes. Therefore, the designer of a process model should reflect the individual views of users on the process when creating the model. This paper describes a framework to assist process model designers in creating such perspective-compliant models. The framework extends an existing, recommendation-based process modeling support system by distinguishing three modeling perspectives: (1) the modeling purpose (e.g. documentation or execution), (2) the view on the process (e.g. costumer or vendor), and (3) the role in the process execution (e.g. technical support or management level). By classifying process models in this way, designers who create models for the same purpose can later-on better find and re-use relevant fragments of already existing models. To eliminate unwanted parts of relevant models, the framework uses process configuration, a method to easily restrict the behavior depicted in a process model. In this way, the modeling challenges for process designers are reduced and thus the creation of models more consistent with the needs of individual users is simplified. Early evaluations indicate the effectiveness of our approach, which goes beyond conventional modeling support for business processes.