Dimitris Karagiannis

Service-oriented technology and management: Perspectives on research and practice for the coming decade

Service-oriented technologies and management have gained attention in the past few years, promising a way to create the basis for agility so that companies can deliver new, more flexible business processes that harness the value of the services approach from a customers perspective. Service-oriented approaches are used for developing software applications and software-as-a-service that can be sourced as virtual hardware resources, including on-demand and utility computing. The driving forces come from the software engineering community and the e-business community. Service-oriented architecture promotes the loose coupling of software components so that interoperability across programming languages and platforms, and dynamic choreography of business processes can be achieved. Nevertheless, one of todays most pervasive and perplexing challenges for senior managers deals with how and when to make a commitment to the new practices. The purpose of this article is to shed light on multiple issues associated with service-oriented technologies and management by examining several interrelated questions: why is it appropriate now to study the related business problems from the point of view of services research? What new conceptual frameworks and theoretical perspectives are appropriate for studying service-oriented technologies and management? What value will a service science and business process modeling offer to the firms that adopt them? And, how can these approaches be implemented so as to address the major challenges that organizations face with technology, information and strategy? We contribute new knowledge in this area by tying the economics and information technology strategy perspectives to the semantic and design science perspectives for a broader audience. Usually the more technical perspective is offered on a standalone basis, and confined to the systems space - even when the discussion is about business processes. This article also offers insights on these issues from the multiple perspectives of industry and academic thought leaders.

Memorandum on design-oriented information systems research

Information Systems Research (“Wirtschaftsinformatik”) basically follows two research approaches: the behavioristic approach and the design-oriented approach. In this memorandum, 10 authors propose principles of design-oriented information systems research. Moreover, the memorandum is supported by 111 full professors from the German-speaking scientific community, who with their signature advocate the principles specified therein.

Integrating machine learning and workflow management to support acquisition and adaptation of workflow models

Current workflow management systems (WFMS) offer little aid for the acquisition of workflow models and their adaptation to changing requirements. To support these activities we propose to integrate machine learning and workflow management. This enables an inductive approach to workflow acquisition and adaptation by processing traces of manually enacted workflows. We present a machine learning component that combines two different machine learning algorithms. In this paper we focus mainly on the first one, which induces the structure of the workflow, based on the induction of hidden markov models. The second algorithm, a standard decision rule induction algorithm, induces transition conditions. The main concepts have been implemented in a prototype, which we have validated using artificial process traces. The induced workflow models can be imported by the business process management system ADONIS.

Workflow mining with InWoLvE

State of the art information systems are based on explicit process models called workflow models. Experience from industrial practice shows that the definition of workflow models is a very time consuming and error prone task. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in applying techniques from data mining and machine learning to support this task. This approach has also been termed as process or workflow mining. In this paper, we give an overview of the algorithms that were implemented within the InWoLvE workflow mining system, we summarize the most important results of their experimental evalualion and we present the experiences that were made in the first industrial application of InWoLvE.

Ein Geschäftsprozessmanagement- Werkzeug der nächsten Generation - ADONIS: Konzeption und Anwendungen

At present, state-of-the-art business process management tools usually offer hard-coded methods, that are only partially adaptable. Tools based on metamodeling concepts are bere named next-generation tools, The paper describes the potential of these tools by taking ADONIS as an exam ple. Based on the explanation of the ADONIS concepts three application areas and its corresponding methods are presented: The integrated management of products and busi ness processes, the development of workflow applications and the model-based configura tion of standard software.

Introduction to Business Process Management Systems Concepts

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are expected to meet the requirements of new designed business applications by supporting different frameworks which enable the modelling of current and anticipating future business application needs, integrating the existing and the new information technology enterprise environment, and providing a continuous performance method for assessment and improvement of the running business.

Enterprise Model Integration

Due to rapid changing business requirements the complexity in developing enterprise-spanning applications is continually growing. A vital field of delivering technical concepts and technologies for integrating heterogeneous applications and components to support inter-organisational business processes is the area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). A common characteristic of all EAI approaches is their focus on technical and runtime aspects of integration. From our project experiences in developing large B2B applications, it is necessary to integrate applications on the business and conceptual level as well. Because of the diversity of models and modelling languages for developing enterprise applications, we propose the Enterprise Model Integration (EMI) approach. In this paper we describe basic concepts of EMI, a pattern system for metamodel integration, and a case study applying EMI for developing B2B applications. The EMI approach is compatible with the MDA infrastructure and implemented within the meta model management tool ADONIS.

On the Conceptualisation of Modelling Methods Using the ADOxx Meta Modelling Platform

In this paper we analyse the conceptualisation of modelling methods. Thereby we understand, how the components of a specific implementation platform support the design of modelling methods. For this purpose we use the ADOxx meta modelling platform and investigate, how four selected functionalities of enterprise information systems for supporting user interaction, process-based optimisation, interfaces to other systems, and complex analyses are realised. We discuss these four functionalities by reverting to excerpts of the visual representation of modelling methods from the areas of requirements engineering, business process management, e-learning, and enterprise architecture management. This permits us to highlight the interdependencies between the modelling language, the modelling procedure, mechanisms and algorithms and the functionalities of the underlying technical platform that have to be taken into account during the conceptualisation.

Agile modeling method engineering

By repurposing agility principles established in software engineering, this paper provides an overview on the practice of Agile Modeling Method Engineering (AMME) driven by evolving requirements and motivated by emerging paradigms and research initiative -- e.g., Enterprise Modeling, Factories of the Future, Internet of Things, Cyber-physical Systems. The approach has emerged from experiences with meta-modeling projects developed within the frame of the Open Model Initiative Laboratory (OMILab), where flexibility challenges have been raised by (a) evolving modeling requirements, (b) modeling requirements propagating from run-time systems requirements, as well as (c) requirements pertaining to domain-specificity. The framework and the characteristics of AMME are hereby discussed with respect to both methodological and architectural aspects and the Open Model Initiative Laboratory is be presented as an instance setup of the generalized AMME framework.

Process-oriented knowledge management systems based on KM-services: the PROMOTE® approach

This article describes the PROMOTE® approach, to define and implement a Service-Based Enterprise Knowledge Management System (E-KMS) that has been developed during the EC-funded project PROMOTE (IST-1999-11658). The aim is to define a modelling language that is used to analyse, document and implement an E-KMS on the basis of so-called Knowledge Management Processes (KMPs). KMPs define the knowledge interaction between knowledge workers in a process-oriented manner and consists of activities that are supported by knowledge management key actions (KA) like searching, categorising or storing information. These knowledge management key actions are supported by Knowledge Management Services (KM-Service). The prototype of PROMOTE® is briefly mentioned to discuss the KMP-models and the service based E-KMS. Copyright