Christian Janiesch

Beyond process monitoring: a proof‐of‐concept of event‐driven business activity management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show how to employ complex event processing (CEP) for the observation and management of business processes. It proposes a conceptual architecture of BPM event producer, processor, and consumer and describes technical implications for the application with standard software in a perfect order scenario.Design/methodology/approach – The authors discuss business process analytics as the technological background. The capabilities of CEP in a BPM context are outlined an architecture design is proposed. A sophisticated proof‐of‐concept demonstrates its applicability.Findings – The results overcome the separation and data latency issues of process controlling, monitoring, and simulation. Distinct analyses of past, present, and future blur into a holistic real‐time approach. The authors highlight the necessity for configurable event producer in BPM engines, process event support in CEP engines, a common process event format, connectors to visualizers, notifiers and return c...

Reuse Mechanisms in Situational Method Engineering

Methods describe systematic procedures to overcome problems. It has been widely acknowledged that methods have to be adapted to the context of their application in order to maximize their impact. Since the original proposal of situational method engineering, numerous approaches have been introduced to tackle this problem. In order to efficiently design situation specific methods it is necessary to reuse existing knowledge. Reuse mechanisms have emerged in different research areas that can be transferred to method engineering. The objective of this paper is to identify relevant reuse mechanisms for method engineering and to review the literature for their usage. Thereof, we derive suggestions for the improvement of existing method engineering approaches and the design of new ones.

Elastic Business Process Management

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them.In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management. Survey of state of the art in infrastructural challenges for elastic BPM.Scheduling, resource allocation, process monitoring, decentralized coordination and state management for elastic processes are discussed in detail.Identification of future research directions.

A blueprint for event-driven business activity management

Timely insight into a companys business processes is of great importance for operational efficiency. However, still today companies struggle with the inflexibility of monitoring solutions and reacting to process information on time. We review the current state of the art of business process management and analytics and put it in relation to complex event processing to explore process data. Following the tri-partition in complex event processing of event producer, processor, and consumer, we develop an architecture for event-driven business activity management which is capable of delivering blueprints for flexible business activity monitoring as well as closed loop action to manage the full circle of automated insight to action. We close with a discussion of future research directions.

Eine Infrastruktur für das Internet der Dienste

ZusammenfassungenDer Dienstleistungssektor ist der größte Arbeitgeber in Deutschland und hat überdurchschnittliche Wachstumsraten. Ein Ziel des Texo-Projekts ist es, Dienstleistungen (ähnlich zu Produkten) über Business Webs handelbar und damit auch exportierbar zu machen. Business Webs sind Dienstleistungsnetzwerke, in denen unabhängige Unternehmen zusammenarbeiten, um gemeinsam Dienstleistungen zu erbringen. Hierfür wird mit Texo eine Infrastruktur entwickelt, um diese Dienstleistungen im Internet bereitzustellen. Die Komponierbarkeit von Dienstleistungen ist dabei eine zentrale Eigenschaft, um aufbauend auf existierenden Dienstleistungen neue, innovative Dienstleistungen zu realisieren. Dabei werden diese Dienstleistungen von unterschiedlichen Anbietern bereitgestellt und integriert. Der Fokus liegt auf webbasierten Dienstleistungen, die zugreifbar über das Internet sind (eServices). Es werden sowohl Business-Dienste (Dienstleistungen) als auch deren Realisierung durch technische Dienste (z. B. Webservices) betrachtet. Der Texo-Marktplatz eröffnet damit kleinen und mittelständischen Dienstleistern neue Märkte und ermöglicht es Texo-Nutzern, ihre Software dynamisch an Veränderungen anzupassen. Auf Basis differenzierter Geschäftsmodelle entstehen individuelle Geschäftsbeziehungen. Der vorliegende Artikel erläutert den konzeptionellen Rahmen dieses Projekts an einem konkreten Beispiel.

Challenges of governance approaches for service-oriented architectures

IT Systems in companies nowadays are confronted with constantly changing market conditions, new competitive threats and an increasing number of legal regulations. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm provides a promising way to address these challenges at the level of the companys IT infrastructure. These challenges and the management of the introduced complexity and heterogeneity are targeted by SOA Governance approaches. Hereby, the basic structure of IT Governance frameworks is applicable to SOA; however, they lack applicability concerning some SOA-specific challenges. In this paper, we discuss deficiencies and provide insights of what regulation challenges a SOA Governance approach is actually required to be capable of, in particular in the area of service lifecycles and service marketplaces.

Restrictions in process design: a case study on workflows in healthcare

Automating existing processes is as paving cow path compared to major business process reengineering. However, this rather radical approach is not suitable for all business fields. It requires the freedom to modify organizational structures and free core business processes from nonvalue adding activities. In sectors like healthcare, there are a variety of legal restrictions and treatment guidelines practitioners have to comply with. Hence, freedom to reorganize the organization and to omit non-value adding activities is heavily compromised. In this paper we present findings from a case study that exemplify restrictions in process reorganization and suggest utilizing more moderate approaches to process management.

Scalable Business Process Execution in the Cloud

Business processes orchestrate service requests in a structured fashion. Process knowledge, however, has rarely been used to predict and decide about cloud infrastructure resource usage. In this paper, we present an approach for BPM-aware cloud computing that builds on process knowledge to improve the timeliness and quality of resource scaling decisions. We introduce an IaaS resource controller based on fuzzy theory that monitors process execution and that is used to predict and control resource requirements for subsequent process tasks. In a laboratory experiment, we evaluate the controller design against a commercially available state-of-the-art auto scaler. Based on the results, we discuss improvements and limitations, and suggest directions for further research.

Optimizing the Performance of Automated Business Processes Executed on Virtualized Infrastructure

With few exceptions, the opportunities cloud computing offers to business process management (BPM) technologies have been neglected so far. We investigate opportunities and challenges of implementing a BPM-aware cloud architecture for the benefit of process runtime optimization. Processes with predominantly automated tasks such as data transformation processes are key targets for this runtime optimization. In theory, off-the-shelf mechanisms offered by cloud providers, such as horizontal scaling, should already provide as much computational resources as necessary for a process to execute in a timely fashion. However, we show that making process data available to scaling decisions can significantly improve process turnaround time and better cater for the needs of BPM. We present a model and method of cloud-aware business process optimization which provides computational resources based on process knowledge. We describe a performance measurement experiment and evaluate it against the performance of a standard automatic horizontal scaling controller to demonstrate its potential.

The Internet of Services and USDL

A prominent research focus, especially in the context of EU public funding, has been the systematic use of the Internet for new ways of value creation in the services sector. This idea of service networks in the Internet, frequently dubbed the Internet of Services orWeb service ecosystems, wants to make services tradable in digital media. In order to enable communication and trade between providers and consumers of services, the Internet of Services requires a standard that creates a “commercial envelope” around a service. This is where the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) comes into play as a normative and balanced unification of service information. The unified description established by USDL is machineprocessable, considers technical and business aspects of a service as well as functional and non-functional attributes.