Daniel Pfeiffer

Domain specific process modelling in public administrations: the PICTURE-approach

In this paper a domain specific process modelling method for public administrations is presented. The public sector is facing an increased service level demand from citizens and companies which comes along with reduced financial scope. Higher process efficiency as well as time and cost savings are required to cope with this challenge. However, reorganisation projects in public administrations with established generic process modelling methods could only identify limited reorganisation potential and just led to small local improvements [1]. Therefore, we have created the domain specific modelling approach PICTURE. The PICTURE-method applies the domain vocabulary to efficiently capture the process landscape of a public organisation. Thus, PICTURE creates process transparency and is able to detect holistic reorganisation potentials within the entire administration.

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.

Auto-completion for Executable Business Process Models

This work presents an auto-completion mechanism for supporting the creation of executable business process models. Currently, process modeling tools provide only little support to identify the relevant services that are needed to execute the process model – the selection of appropriate services is left to the skills of the modeler. A novel solution technique for this problem is proposed here as the combination of (1) a context-based analysis, (2) by taking pre and post-conditions into account, and by (3) evaluating the non-functional properties of the functionally and context-wise fitting services.

Semantic Business Process Management

The objective of this chapter is to describe and evaluate an approach for the automated analysis of business process models. It is described why an automated way of process analysis is necessary and why it is beneficial to use our approach. As business process models are moving in the center of decision making, it is important for the corresponding decision makers to get transparent, fast, and comprehensive results of process analysis. Dealing with huge amount of data this is only possible with automated support. Based on a comprehensive literature study, we identified different deviations and conflicts that usually arise in business process modeling projects. The class of semantic building block-based languages which combines structural modeling elements with corresponding domain semantics can help avoiding these conflicts. Beside the conceptual development of the language class we conducted an empirical evaluation of PICTURE, a business process modeling language that is an instantiation of semantic building block-based languages. Our results show that (a) our derived language class is applicable, (b) modeling conflicts significantly can be reduced, and (c) modeled data can be analyzed automatically.

Evaluation of ICT Investments in Public Administrations Based on Business Process Models

Within the public sector domain there is great potential for business process optimization through ICT. However, until today these possibilities remain largely unexploited. To measure the impact of ICT-investments all processes of a public administration have to be taken into account. The PICTURE modelling method has been proposed as a way to efficiently model the whole process landscape of a public administration. Based on the processes captured, the impact of certain ICT functionalities can be analyzed. ICT investment decisions become more transparent towards the political leadership which are the decision makers in the public sector. This paper has two research objectives: First, an architecture for an semi-automated evaluation of ICT investment decisions is introduced. Second, the practical feasibility of the architecture is shown based on an investment decision for a document management system.

Forschungsmethodik einer Integrationsdisziplin - Eine Fortführung und Ergänzung zu Lutz Heinrichs "Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wirtschaftsinformatik" aus gestaltungsorientierter Perspektive

Die gestaltungsorientierte Wirtschaftsinformatikforschung sieht sich der Aufgabe einer Profilierung im internationalen Wissenschaftskontext gegenuber. Analysen belegen, dass sich die deutsche Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI) durch eine starke Tradition gestaltungsorientierter Forschung auszeichnet. Dies ausert sich insbesondere in Form einer deutlich ausgepragten Forschung zur Modellierung (konzeptionelle Modellierung, Unternehmensmodellierung, Referenzmodellierung etc.) sowie dadurch, die Validitat der Forschungsergebnisse durch eine prototypische Umsetzung zu prufen (Frank 2006; Goeken 2003; Heinrich 2005; Lange 2006).

Semantic Business Process Modelling and Analysis

The objective of this chapter is to describe and evaluate an approach for the automated analysis of business process models. Business process models have become a valuable tool for decision makers. To be helpful in decision making the information in the process models has to be prepared for a managerial target group. Modeling of business process landscapes leads to a huge set of data about an organization. To extract the decision relevant information from this fact base can be supported by automated analysis mechanisms. However, the automated analysis of business process models is a complex task due to challenges of processing natural language statements as part of the models. In the chapter we introduce a class of process modeling languages, the semantic building block-based languages that enable an automated analysis of their resulting models. Based on a comprehensive literature study, we identified different deviations and conflicts that usually arise in business process modeling projects. We show that semantic building block-based languages can help avoiding these conflicts. Based on the domain-specific language PICTURE we demonstrate with a case study that building block-based languages can be used for automated process analysis in practical project settings.

Semantic-Web-Technologien in der Arbeitsplatzvermittlung

ZusammenfassungThe importance of the Internet for job procurement is increasing for the reason that three quarters of the people in the employment age are online. On the other hand because ever more companies are publishing their job offers on the Web. However, due to the large number of openings published online it is almost impossible for job seekers and job portals to gain an overview of the entire employment market. Since job offers lack semantically meaningful annotations, the search and integration into databases are made highly difficult. Applying Semantic Web technologies to the e-recruitment process provides advantages for all participants in the market. In this paper we describe a method for analysing the domain-specific language of an application domain. We use this method to describe the e-recruitment process and the necessary ontologies for annotating job offers and job applications. In conclusion, we present the prototypical implementation of the scenario based on Semantic Web, especially semantic matching.