Konstantin Hoesch-Klohe

Strategic alignment of business processes

Strategic alignment is a mechanism by which an organization can visualize the relationship between its business processes and strategies. It enables organizational decision makers to collect meaningful insights based on their current processes. Currently it is difficult to show the sustainability of an organization and to determine an optimal set of processes that are required for realizing strategies. Further, there is not a general framework for strategic alignment that can ease this problem. In this article, we propose such a general framework for strategic alignment, which helps develop a clear understanding of the relationships between strategies and business processes. The framework gives organizations an understanding of the relationship between a set of processes and the realization of a set of strategies; it also shows the optimal set of processes that can achieve these strategies.

Carbon-aware business process design in Abnoba

A key element of any approach to meeting the climate change challenge is the ability to improve operational efficiency in a pervasive fashion. The notion of a business process is a particularly useful unit of analysis in this context. This article describes a subset of the Abnoba framework for green business process management and shows how an algebraic framework can be leveraged to enable an environmental assessment on multiple heterogeneous dimensions (of qualitative or quantitative nature). Furthermore, a machinery for process improvement is outlined.

Advancing Business Process Technology for Humanity: Opportunities and Challenges of Green BPM for Sustainable Business Activities

The sustainability of organizations’ business activities is currently an intensely discussed issue which is gaining increasing importance. The research field of Green Information Systems (Green IS) is concerned with designing and investigating innovative methods and techniques supporting a better sustainability of business activities based on information systems (IS). According to the IEEE tagline Advancing Technology for Humanity, IS can contribute to a more sustainable business world and thus to a betterment of humanity. In our contribution, we argue that techniques and methods from the field of Business Process Management (BPM) can considerably support the preservation of the environment while performing business activities and thus contribute to a betterment of human living conditions. Organizational as well as technological opportunities and challenges of Green BPM are investigated and demonstrated by means of exemplary application scenarios from different organizational contexts. In order to delineate the technological potential of Green BPM, a semi-automated approach for process sustainability improvement is presented by means of a further application scenario.

Business process improvement in Abnoba

A key element of any approach to meeting the climate change challenge is the ability to improve operational efficiency in a pervasive fashion. The notion of a business process is a particularly useful unit of analysis in this context. In the Abnoba framework, we enable business process management (and in particular, business process design/redesign) with explicit support for the environmental sustainability aspects of processes. This article extends our earlier work on the framework by introducing and elaborating a machinery for (semi-)automated process re-design discovery. The machinery leverages a library of process snippets/fragments, used to replace fragments from the library with fragments of the process design, such that the process re-designs meets functional-, process provisioning-, and compliance requirements and the sustainability profile is improved.

The business service representation language: a preliminary report

The recent interest in services science has led to research in business service management, using a multi-disciplinary synthesis of thinking from the disciplines of computing, management, marketing and potentially several others. Business services can be of many different kinds. The notion includes within in its ambit business process outsourcing services, clinical services, customer contact services as well as IT-enabled services, to name a few representative examples. A key component of any business service management framework is a service modeling language.

Correlating Business Objectives with Services: An Ontology-Driven Approach

Ensuring that the IT/business functions of an organization realize its business objectives has long been recognized as a critically important question. This paper reports on a project that seeks to overturn established management orthodoxy by establishing that business objectives can be adequately modeled by leveraging a domain ontology and that methodological and tool support can be provided for the task of correlating the objectives of an organization and its service offerings. This paper presents an interim report from this project that describes how to leverage a domain ontology in i) building business objective/goal models in a top-down manner (required to be able to refine these to a level where there could be an ontological match between the languages used to describe objectives and services); ii) assessing the degree of ontological match between low-level objectives and business services as a step towards an automated framework for establishing strategic service alignment. We provide a brief illustration of our in-progress implementation within a toolkit called ServAlign.

Maintaining motivation models (in BMM) in the context of a (WSDL-S) service landscape

The ever-changing business context requires organisations to constantly adapt their motivation and service representations. While there has been work focusing on the relation between the motivation- and service level, very little work has been done in providing machinery for handling (propagating) changes at the motivation level and identifying the resulting impact on the service landscape. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which addresses this problem.