Juliane Siegeris

Workflow model compositions preserving relaxed soundness

Very often, e.g. in the context of inter-organizational Workflow or web services, it is necessary to merge existing business process descriptions. It is clear that correctness criteria valid for the single process descriptions should remain valid also for the combined model. However, looking at the popular soundness criterion this can not always be guaranteed. In this paper various composition alternatives are summarized and their ability to preserve relaxed soundness (in contrast to soundness) is investigated.

Model Driven Business Transformation --- An Experience Report

This report details the experience made using BPMN as the process modeling notation for a large-scale modeling effort that formed the heart of a business transformation project. It illustrates the practical limitations encountered in using BPMN and how they were overcome by using UML to extend BPMN. The automated document generation approach used to generate user-friendly process documentation from the BPMN model and the instruments used to drive the business transformation project forward are explained.

Why Are Process Variants Important in Process Monitoring? The Case of Zalando SE.

(a) Situation faced: Business process models serve various purposes. As precise documentations of an implemented business processes, they provide inputs with which to configure process monitoring systems, enabling the specification of monitoring points and metrics. However, complex business processes have a quantity of variants that can impede the activation of process monitoring. To mitigate this issue, we seek to reduce the number of process variants by performing behavioral analyses. (b) Action taken: Variants of a business process originate from points in the process model where the control flow might diverge, such as at decision gateways and racing events. We systematically identify the underlying semantics to choose from a set of alternative paths and characterize the resulting variants. This effort offers the opportunity to reduce the variability in business processes that is due to modeling errors, inconsistent labeling, and duplicate or redundant configurations of these points. (c) Results achieved: For a sub-process of an order-to-cash process from the e-commerce industry, we discovered 59,244 variants, of which only 360 variants lead to a successful continuation of the process. The remaining variants cover exception handling and customer interaction. While these variants do not lead to a successful outcome and might not qualify for the “happy path” of this process, they are crucial in terms of customer satisfaction and must be monitored and controlled. Using a set of methods (actions taken), we reduced the number of variants to 11,000. These actions reduced overhead in the process and normalized decision labels, thereby significantly increasing the process model’s quality. (d) Lessons learned: We elaborate on the impact of variants on the configuration of a process monitoring system, and show how the number of model variants can be significantly reduced. Our analysis shows that the semantic quality of the process model increases as a result. This reduction effort involves a structured approach that considers all variants of a business process, rather than focusing only on the most frequent or most important cases.

Informatik – ein Männerfach!?

ZusammenfassungIn Deutschland gibt es nur wenige Informatikerinnen. Schon in der Schule wählen Mädchen IT-Kurse selten. Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig. Sie liegen in gesellschaftlichen Stereotypisierungen und Rollenbildern, die eine traditionelle Verhaltenserwartung für die Geschlechter festlegen. Dabei schließt sich Informatik als technikorientiertes Fach und Frau-Sein in der Gesellschaft aus. Dies führt dazu, dass viele Mädchen Technik und Informatik als ,,unweiblich“ betrachten und technische Berufe oder Studiengänge ablehnen. Dabei schwingen eine antizipierte Benachteiligung aufgrund des Geschlechts und eine angenommene schlechte Vereinbarkeit mit einer späteren Familie mit. Mit dem Angebot eines reinen Frauenstudiengangs in Informatik an der Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin werden junge, an IT interessierte Frauen angesprochen, die keine Informatik-Vorkenntnisse haben. Dieser Ansatz verspricht, mehr Informatikerinnen auf den Arbeitsmarkt zu bringen.

Lehrmethodenvielfalt im Curriculum des Studiengangs Informatik und Wirtschaft – Ein Erfahrungsbericht

Im Studiengang “Informatik und Wirtschaft” an der HTW Berlin wurden in den letzten drei Jahren Erfahrungen mit verschiedenen Lehrformen gesammelt. Der Beitrag greift exemplarisch drei Formate heraus und stellt diese vor. Diskutiert werden die im Curriculum verankerte Veranstaltung “Projekte in der Wirtschaft”, ein Blockseminar in Form eines Hackathon und der Einsatz des Lernteamcoaching als Ersatz fur eine normale Vorlesung.

Agile redesign of student projects in a women-only degree course

Agile or not agile is no longer a question as almost every company boasts about being agile and thereby more efficient. Being agile introduces new requirements and areas of development for companies and teams. Cooperation ideally is done on a level playing field in all areas. Because of this the classical hierarchical structures cease to be meaningful, and, due to new roles such as Scrum Master and Product Owner, new career opportunities are created. A concern of the mono-educative program computer science and business administration of HTW is to prepare the students for these new requirements and to convey both, the agile approach and the required skills of the involved roles and by that enabling them to better enter the field of STEM, where women are still marginalized and to benefit from the agil culture. This paper discusses the challenges that must be overcome due to introducing Scrum into university courses and presents the pilot implementation by showcasing established student projects.

From a Family of State-Centric PAIS to a Configurable and Parameterized Business Process Architecture

The paper presents a solution to model and refine processes of long-living business objects. The proposed BPMN model describes the life-cycle of one business object, covering the passed states, the events that invoke state changes and the acitivities that are triggered to perform operations on the object which as a result lead to new states.