Ilia Bider

Towards a formal definition of goal‐oriented business process patterns

Purpose - Organizations of today are becoming ever more focused on their business processes. This has resulted in an increasing interest in using best practices for business process re-engineering. ...

State‐flow technique for business process analysis: case studies

The growth of the Internet and information technology often leads to more customer requests and can mean that a small staff must cope with a large number of business processes. Effective management under these circumstances requires a computer system able to support these business processes. Such a system cannot be developed without modeling business processes, which requires a great deal of “in‐house” information from the people who participate in business processes – information on routines, rules, etc. In general, it is not enough to get the process participants to describe their actions – they should first achieve a deeper understanding of the processes themselves (in terms of goals, activities, etc). A technique called state flow (SF) has been developed to help process participants understand processes. The paper gives an overview of the application of the SF technique in building models of two business processes: a decision‐making process; and a process of recruiting new members (for a non‐profit association).

Business process support as a basis for computerized knowledge management

One of the major factors behind the less successful implementations of computerized knowledge management systems (KMS) is lack of motivation to use such a system on behalf of the end-users. To create such a motivation, i.e., achieve usability, a computerized KMS should be integrated with a business process support (BPS) system and provide three main functionalities: (1) provide a process context, (2) gather automatically experience-based knowledge, and (3) provide an active generalized knowledge base. Such an integrated KMS/BPS can be built using a state-oriented view on business processes. The paper describes a version of a system built according to this view. The system fully implements the first two functionalities, the third one being under development. The system is currently installed at a pilot site. Research work in progress includes creating a formal language for representing an active generalized knowledge base, and investigating the impact of the introduction of an integrated KMS/BPS on the pilot organization.

Agile business process development: why, how and when--applying Nonaka's theory of knowledge transformation to business process development

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and configured according to the business process model created. The traditional approach has a number of risks that become visible only during the latest phase of introducing the system in the organizational practice, e.g., when it becomes clear that the system does not fit the business and/or people who work in it. These risks could be mitigated by using an agile approach to the development of business processes. In agile approach: (a) the phases of process modeling, IT-system design, and manufacturing are merged into one, and (b) instead of using one big cycle, a series of smaller development cycles is used. The paper discusses what is needed to implement the agile approach, and in which business situations the agile approach is the most appropriate. Examples of tools to support agile development are presented and analyzed. The results presented in the paper have been achieved based on the knowledge transformation perspective along the lines suggested by Nonaka in SECI model. The modification of this model has been used to understand the risks and requirements connected to a particular process development strategy.

Integration of business process support with knowledge management: A practical perspective

For knowledge management to be of use in an organization, it should be seamlessly incorporated in everyday business activities. Large parts of an organization’s activities, especially on the operational level, are structured around business processes. Therefore, knowledge management needs to be integrated with these processes, which means that a computerized system that supports business processes should also support knowledge management. This paper reports on the experiences of implementing an integrated business process support system and knowledge management system into an organization. The implementation is the subject of a research project. The project’s objective is to work out techniques for developing integrated process and knowledge management systems, and investigate effects of introducing such a system in operational practice, e.g., effects on productivity, internal cooperation, and democracy in organizational life.

Design science in action: developing a modeling technique for eliciting requirements on business process management (BPM) tools

Selecting a suitable business process management (BPM) tool to build a business process support system for a particular business process is difficult. There are a number of BPM tools on the market that are available as systems to install locally and as services in the cloud. These tools are based on different BPM paradigms (e.g., workflow or case management) and provide different capabilities (e.g., enforcement of the control flow, shared spaces, or a collaborative environment). This makes it difficult for an organization to select a tool that would fit the business processes at hand. The paper suggests a solution for this problem. The core of the solution is a modeling technique for business processes for eliciting their requirements for a suitable BPM tool. It produces a high-level, business process model, called a “step-relationship” model that depicts the essential characteristics of a process in a paradigm-independent way. The solution presented in this paper has been developed based on the paradigm of design science research, and the paper discusses the research project from the design science perspective. The solution has been applied in two case studies in order to demonstrate its feasibility.

A fractal enterprise model and its application for business development

This paper suggests a new type of enterprise models called fractal enterprise models (FEM), with accompanying methodological support for their design. FEM shows interconnections between the business processes in an enterprise by connecting them to the assets they use and manage. Assets considered in the model could be tangible (buildings, heavy machinery, etc.) and intangible (employees, business process definitions, etc.). A FEM model is built by using two types of patterns called archetypes: a process-assets archetype that connects a process with assets used in it, and an asset-processes archetype that connects an asset with processes aimed to manage this asset (e.g., hiring people, or servicing machinery). Alternating these patterns creates a fractal structure that makes relationships between various parts of the enterprise explicit. FEM can be used for different purposes, including finding a majority of the processes in an enterprise and planning business change or radical transformation. Besides discussing FEM and areas of its usage, the paper presents results from a completed project in order to test the practical usefulness of FEM and its related methodological support.

Simulating Apprenticeship Using Multimedia in Higher Education: A Case from the Information Systems Field

Purpose – This paper aims to report on a project aimed at using simulation for improving the quality of teaching and learning modeling skills. More specifically, the project goal was to facilitate the students to acquire skills of building models of organizational structure and behavior through analysis of internal and external documents, and interviews with employees and management. An important skill that practitioners in the information systems field need to possess is the skill of modeling information systems. The main problem with acquiring modeling skills is to learn how to extract knowledge from the unstructured reality of business life. Design/methodology/approach – To achieve the goal, a solution was introduced in the form of a computerized environment utilizing multimedia to simulate a case of an apprenticeship situation. The paper gives an overview of the problem that the solution addresses, presents the solution and reports on the trial completed in a first-year undergraduate course at Stockho...

Using a Socio-Technical Model of a Global Software Development Project for Facilitating Risk Management and Improving the Project Structure

Any global software development project needs to deal with distances – geographical, cultural, time zone, etc. – between the groups of developers engaged in the project. To successfully manage the risks caused by such distances, there is a need to explicate and present the distances in a form suitable for manual or semi-automatic analysis, the goal of which is to detect potential risks and find ways of mitigating them. The article presents a technique of modeling a global software development project suitable for such analysis. The project is modeled as a complex socio-technical system that consists of functional components connected to each other through output-input relationships. The components do not coincide with the organizational units of the project, and their teams can be distributed through the geographical and organizational landscape of the project. The modeling technique helps to explicate and represent various kinds of distances between the functional components to determine which of them constitute risk factors. The technique was developed during two case studies, of which the second is used for presenting and demonstrating the new modeling technique in the article.

Towards a Business Process Modeling Technique for Agile Development of Case Management Systems

A modern organization needs to adapt its behavior to changes in the business environment by changing its Business Processes (BP) and corresponding Business Process Support (BPS) systems. One way of achieving such adaptability is via separation of the system code from the process description/model by applying the concept of executable process models. Furthermore, to ease introduction of changes, such process model should separate different perspectives, for example, control-flow, human resources, and data perspectives, from each other. In addition, for developing a completely new process, it should be possible to start with a reduced process model to get a BPS system quickly running, and then continue to develop it in an agile manner. This article consists of two parts, the first sets requirements on modeling techniques that could be used in the tools that supports agile development of BPs and BPS systems. The second part suggests a business process modeling technique that allows to start modeling with the data/information perspective which would be appropriate for processes supported by Case or Adaptive Case Management (CM/ACM) systems. In a model produced by this technique, called data-centric business process model, a process instance/case is defined as sequence of states in a specially designed instance database, while the process model is defined as a set of rules that set restrictions on allowed states and transitions between them. The article details the background for the project of developing the data-centric process modeling technique, presents the outline of the structure of the model, and gives formal definitions for a substantial part of the model.