Keith D. Swenson

Process Mining Manifesto

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

Developing web services choreography standards: the case of REST vs. SOAP

This paper presents a case study of the development of standards in the area of cross-organizational workflows based on web services. We discuss two opposing types of standards: those based on SOAP, with tightly coupled designs similar to remote procedure calls, and those based on REST, with loosely coupled designs similar to the navigating of web links. We illustrate the standardization process, clarify the technical underpinnings of the conflict, and analyze the interests of stakeholders. The decision criteria for each group of stakeholders are discussed. Finally, we present implications for both the workflow and the wider Internet communities.

Visual support for reengineering work processes

A model for collaborative work process and a graphical language to support this model is presented. The model allows for informal flow of communications and flexible access to information along with a formal flow of responsibility. Work is decomposed into a network of task assignments (actually requests for those tasks), which may be recursively decomposed to finer grained tasks. The model includes consideration for authority and responsibility. Process flow can be dynamically modified. Policies (templates for a process) may be tailored to provide versions of a process customized for different individuals. The visual language is designed to ease the creation of policies and modification of ongoing processes, as well as to display the status of an active process.

Adaptive Case Management: Overview and Research Challenges

Case management refers to the coordination of work that is not routine and predictable, and requires human judgment. Case management has applications in many domains such as healthcare, legal, police detective, social work, etc. The common aspect of such domains is that the work procedure cannot be prescribed into machine programs, instead the work is highly variable and must be figured out by knowledge workers each time. They might start with high-level guidelines and frameworks, but the sensitive dependence upon the details of the case mean that the work patterns emerge from the case as more information becomes available. Knowledge workers must make decisions on the course of action as the case proceeds. Traditionally case management has been supported by custom-built applications for each domain. There are approaches that attempt to standardize work practices without appreciating the full range of required responses. There is a push in industry from different vendors in areas such as enterprise content management, customer relationship management and business process management also to position their products as case management applications. In this article, we will review trends in industry and selected work in academia in the case management space, to identify challenges that the industry and the research community are facing in supporting knowledge workers in an adaptive and flexible manner, where systems need to support the work while should keep the knowledge workers in control.

A visual language to describe collaborative work

In order to satisfy goals for developing collaboration software, a powerful yet simple visual language has been developed for use by end users in describing plans for work activities. The approach presented is unique because the model allows for collaboration during the planning process; different people are responsible for different parts of the plan. Process plans may be modified on the fly, to allow handling of exceptions and other changes. Policies may be created that automatically create a plan for a user in specific situations. Plans at different levels represent the viewpoint of the people responsible for those plans. These visual representations of plans are then used directly to facilitate the coordination of those activities.<<ETX>>

Workflow technology: trade-offs for business process re-engineering

The relationship is examined between Business Process Reengineering (BPR), a significant new management trend across all industries, and Workflow Technology a new and rapidly expanding sector of the software market. Since Workflow is a market driven technology, in order to make a meaningful analysis, we start by presenting the current state of the art in workflow technology, as uncovered by our work within the Workflow Management Coalition. Some aspects of workflow are found to be well suited to support BPR, as long as the process being supported meets one of three criteria. Yet other aspects result in serious drawbacks that limit the benefit gained. Some conclusions are made about how workflow technology will have to evolve in order to more fully support the needs of BPR.

Position: BPMN Is Incompatible with ACM

The role of two-dimensional process graphing in Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is examined. Three design criteria are identified for ACM that were never considered for BPMN. The question for discussion is whether these requirements eliminate all kinds of flow-chart type languages from consideration for use as a process modeling language for users of ACM.

BPAF: A Standard for the Interchange of Process Analytics Data

During the initialization and execution of a process instance, multiple events occur which may be of interest to a business, including events that relate to the instantiation and completion of process activities, internal process engine operations and other system and application functions. Process mining and other analytical techniques often involve extracting this process history data from a process execution environment and submitting the data to the process analytics environment for processing. We present the Business Process Analytics Format, an XML-based interchange format for process audit events that combines an extensible state model with a robust XML representation, is able to accommodate multiple event originators and can map to the popular MXML format used in process mining applications.

Demo: Cognoscenti Open Source Software for Experimentation on Adaptive Case Management Approaches

Cognoscenti is an experimental system for exploring different approaches to supporting of complex, unpredictable work patterns. The tendency with such work environments is to make increasingly sophisticated interaction patterns, which ultimately overwhelm the user with options. The challenge is to keep the necessary cognitive concepts very simple, allow the knowledge worker a lot of freedom, but at the same time offer structural support where necessary for security and accesscontrol. Cognoscenti is freely available as an open source platform with a basic set of capabilities for tracking documents, notes, goals, and roles which might be used for further exploration into knowledge worker support patterns.

Error Detection in Concurrent Java Programs

Concurrency in multithreaded programs introduces additional complexity in software verification and testing, and thereby significantly increases the cost of Quality Assurance (QA). We present a case study in which a specialized model checker was used to discover concurrency errors in a large preexisting code base. The results revealed race conditions that lead to data corruption errors whose detection would have been prohibitively expensive with conventional testing and QA methods. We describe our methodology and highlight parts of the methodology that could be automated.