George Koliadis

Auditing Business Process Compliance

Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations. We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support.

Relating business process models to goal-oriented requirements models in KAOS

Business Process Management (BPM) has many anticipated benefits including accelerated process improvement, at the operational level, with the use of highly configurable and adaptive “process aware” information systems [1] [2]. The facility for improved agility fosters the need for continual measurement and control of business processes to assess and manage their effective evolution, in-line with organizational objectives. This paper proposes the GoalBPM methodology for relating business process models (modeled using BPMN) to high-level stakeholder goals (modeled using KAOS). We propose informal (manual) techniques (with likely future formalism) for establishing and verifying this relationship, even in dynamic environments where essential alterations to organizational goals and/or process constantly emerge.

Process SEER: A Tool for Semantic Effect Annotation of Business Process Models

A key challenge in devising solutions to a range of problems associated with business process management: process life cycle management, compliance management, enterprise process architectures etc. is the problem of identifying process semantics. The current industry standard business process modeling notation, BPMN, provides little by way of semantic description of the effects of a process (beyond what can be conveyed via the nomenclature of tasks and the decision conditions associated with gateways). In this paper, we describe the conceptual underpinnings, design, implementation and evaluation of the ProcessSEER tool that supports several strategies for obtaining semantic effect descriptions of BPMN process models, without imposing an overly onerous burden of using formal specification on the analyst. The tool requires analysts to describe the immediate effects of each task. These are then accumulated in an automated fashion to obtain cumulative effect annotations for each task in a process. The tool leverages domain ontologies wherever they are available. The tool permits the analyst to specify immediate effect annotations in a practitioner-accessible controlled natural language, which enables formal specification using a limited repertoire of natural language sentence formats. The tool also leverages semantic web services in a similar fashion.

Process Discovery from Model and Text Artefacts

Modeling is an important and time consuming part of the business process management life-cycle. An analyst reviews existing documentation and queries relevant domain experts to construct both mental and concrete models of the domain. To aid this exercise, we propose the Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD) framework and prototype tool that can query heterogeneous information resources (e.g. corporate documentation, web-content, code e.t.c.) and rapidly constructproto-models to be incrementally adjusted to correctness by an analyst. This constitutes a departure from building and constructing models toward just editing them. We believe this rapid mixed-initiative modeling will increase analyst productivity by significant orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. Furthermore, the possibility of using the approach in distributed and real-time settings seems appealing and may help in significantly improving the quality of the models being developed w.r.t. being consistent, complete, and concise.

Verifying Semantic Business Process Models in Inter-operation

Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts.

Rapid business process discovery (R-BPD)

Modeling is an important and time consuming part of the Business Process Management life-cycle. An analyst reviews existing documentation and queries relevant domain experts to construct both mental and concrete models of the domain. To aid this exercise, we propose the Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD) framework and prototype tool that can query heterogeneous information resources (e.g. corporate documentation, web-content, code e.t.c.) and rapidly construct proto-models to be incrementally adjusted to correctness by an analyst. This constitutes a departure from building and constructing models toward just editing them. We believe this rapid mixed-initiative modeling will increase analyst productivity by significant orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. Furthermore, the possibility of using the approach in distributed and real-time settings seems appealing and may help in significantly improving the quality of the models being developed w.r.t. being consistent, complete, and concise.

Towards an Enterprise Business Process Architecture Standard

An effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the ldquopracticalityrdquo of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current state-of-the-art"" in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed.

Actor Eco-systems: From High-Level Agent Models to Executable Processes via Semantic Annotations

We introduce the notion of an actor eco-system a framework that addresses the design-time requirements of building multi-actor (multi-agent) systems such as supply chains, business networks, virtual organizations etc. We describe how semantic annotation of abstract models of actor ecosystems can be used to derive executable process models that realize such systems. We outline a potentially powerful toolkit for model to code transformations in complex agent-oriented settings.

Analyst-Mediated Contextualization of Regulatory Policies

Increasing legislative and regulatory concerns have fueled an interest in effective and efficient tools for managing business process compliance within organizations. In particular, the key challenge is to understand high-level compliance policies in natural language, and interpret them for a particular usage context. These interpreted policies can then be represented in a formal language, and used to (for example) automatically verify compliance of business process executions against these policies. In this paper, we focus on the first part of this problem: interpreting regulatory policies — called \emph{contextualization}. We employ a natural language parser to extract key phrases from the natural language statements and generate possible interpretations from predefined templates. An analyst chooses interpretations according to the organizational context. These interpretations are then grounded further and represented in a formal language. Via a prototype, we demonstrate our approach on real-life security compliance obligations used within IBMs IT service delivery units.

A Conceptual Framework for Business Process Redesign

This paper addresses the problem of managing business process change at the level of design-time artifacts, such as BPMN process models. Our approach relies on a sophisticated scheme for annotating BPMN models with functional effects as well as non-functional properties. This permits us to assess the extent of change being made, as well as the performance characteristics of the resulting processes.