Ligita Businska

Towards Extending BPMN with the Knowledge Dimension

At the root of the success of modeling, design, reengineering, and running business processes is effective use and support of organizational knowledge. Therefore, the relationships between a business process and organizational knowledge should be clearly documented. Several methods have already been elaborated that introduce the process dimension into knowledge management or a knowledge concept into business process modeling. However, the usability of these methods is restricted either by applicability only to knowledge-intensive processes or by relying on sophisticated or uncommon modeling techniques. Building on the experience accumulated by researchers working at the intersection of business process modeling and knowledge management, this paper proposes to extend the well-known Business Process Modeling Notation with the knowledge dimension so that using a common modeling technique it would be possible to relate different forms of knowledge, information and data to the business process model. The approach is demonstrated by a case study from a data base integration project at the Bioinformatics Company.

On Data, Information, and Knowledge Representation in Business Process Models

Three different phenomena, data, information, and knowledge, are relevant in business process modeling. However, business process modeling notations currently do not provide an opportunity to clearly distinguish between them. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the existing notations to learn from their capabilities and drawbacks in order to arrive at modeling tools that can clearly distinguish between data, information, and knowledge.

Multidimensional business process modeling approach

The paper discusses an approach that enables incremental business process modeling and analysis from multitude set of perspectives, thus combining wide spectrum of business process characteristics in a common multidimensional model, and allowing the translation of business process modeled in a particular perspective into other perspectives. The paper presents basic terms and general stages for iterative construction of a multidimensional business process model.

The Formalization of the Business Process Modeling Goals

In business process modeling the de facto standard BPMN has emerged. However, the applications of this notation have many subsets of elements and various extensions. Also, BPMN still coincides with many other modeling languages, forming a large set of available options for business process modeling languages and dialects. While, in general, the goal of modelers is a central notion in the choice of modeling languages and notations, in most researches that propose guidelines, techniques, and methods for business process modeling language evaluation and/or selection, the business process modeling goal is not formalized and not transparently taken into account. To overcome this gap, and to explicate and help to handle business process modeling complexity, the approach to formalize the business process modeling goal, and the supporting three dimensional business process modeling framework, are proposed.

Viable Systems Model in Triple-Agile Context

This paper reports on the results of the research regarding the Triple-Agile concept that has been introduced for supporting agile SMEs with cloud services agilely. The Triple-Agile concept implies three aspects of agility: agility of SME processes, agility of transition to cloud services, and agility of cloud service provision. The paper proposes using a viable system model, in general, and Viable Enterprise Bus design principles, in particular, to reflect services in small and medium sized enterprise ecosystems where both service providers and service consumers are SMEs. The use of a viable system model offers an opportunity to better understand relationships between services and thus may help to improve agility of service provision. The viable system model is applied to a triple-agile ecosystem from two viewpoints: the viewpoint of service and business relationship maturity and the viewpoint of service functions.

Triple-Agile: A Paradigm for Cloud Based SME Process Support

Considering cloud based solutions in business and IT alignment, an ecosystem perspective is here taken. If small and medium enterprises are willing to act agilely and developers of cloud IT solutions are willing to support these enterprises, then it is necessary to ensure rapid and flexible delivery/acquisition/migration regarding new IT solutions and new features thereof. When looking at enterprises and cloud solution providers as constituents of a business ecosystem, a Triple-Agile paradigm emerges, that considers agility from the following three perspectives: the perspective of SME processes, the perspective of adopting of and/or migrating to cloud solutions, and the perspective of cloud service development and management. While there is considerable theoretical and practical experience in each of the perspectives of agility mentioned, their Triple-Agile combination has not yet been properly researched. This paper investigates the possibility of the application of the Triple-Agile paradigm in the context of SMEs and cloud services.

The Goal-Based Selection of the Business Process Modeling Language

Business process models are an essential issue of enterprise modeling because business process modeling is the means for performing a wide range of tasks, such as documentation, communication, business improvement, and capturing requirements for software design up to creation of executable process descriptions. Nowadays a wide range of general purpose business process modeling languages are used for handling these tasks. Constantly also a number of the general purpose modeling language extensions and domain specific modeling languages (DSL) are being developed. Thus, obviously, the universal business process modeling language that would be suitable for all the modeling purposes does not (yet) exist. In such a situation the modeler is faced with the problem of choosing a business process modeling language suitable for a certain modeling purpose. This paper proposes to base the choice of the language on a formalized business process modeling goal and a three dimensional business process modeling framework. The paper also describes how to use the proposed framework to measure the modeling language conformity to a certain modeling goal using a general business process element taxonomy and metrics.

Towards Systematic Reflection of Data, Information, and Knowledge

Towards Systematic Reflection of Data, Information, and Knowledge Currently available business process modeling notations do not provide an opportunity to clearly distinguish between data, information and knowledge. The problem lies mainly in a still not fully agreed-upon understanding of relationship between the notions data, information, and knowledge. Therefore in this paper we focus on the analysis of this relationship by investigating intersection of modern information theory assumptions and knowledge management definitions of information and knowledge. The results are expressed as new graphical notation for knowledge, information, and data flow systematic reflection in business process model.