Ludmila Penicina

Towards Completeness and Lawfulness of Business Process Models

We address the existing gaps between business process models, enterprise architecture (EA) models and, external regulations that hinder completeness and lawfulness of business process models. As a solution we propose a high-level architecture for business process knowledge management that bridges the identified gaps. We use de-facto industry standards for modelling business processes and EA - BPMN and ArchiMate. We propose to use Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) model as a theoretical foundation for storing business process knowledge represented in BPMN and ArchiMate models and storing elements that address lawfulness of the models. BWW model provides a framework for systematically storing internally maintained process knowledge (models) and externally maintained knowledge (regulations), and supporting completeness and lawfulness of the models. Thus, the main contributions of our approach is supporting completeness and lawfulness of business process models and supporting the creation of information services to increase efficiency in the business process modelling context.

Raw Materials for Business Processes in Cloud

The commonalities and differences between business processes of enterprises depend on the level of abstraction at which the processes are represented. At the lower levels of abstraction the processes are complex and their variations cannot be shown by business process frames of higher levels of abstraction. However there are some parts of processes that are common to many enterprises or several units in an enterprise, for instance, the process parts which must conform to particular regulations. The paper proposes an approach for managing regulation dependent business process parts in cloud. The purpose of the approach is to minimize the total time, which enterprises use for incorporation of regulations in their business processes.

Knowledge Requirements Monitoring System: Advantages for Industry and University

Nowadays, graduates have a wide range of opportunities when they are thinking about their further education and it is difficult to choose whether it would be better to go one way or another. One of the most important drivers for the final decision is whether the study program chosen can lead to a good and interesting job in the future. That means that Universities have to reflect the answer to this question in the description of the study programs, but in order to do this they have to know what the main requirements from the Industry are. This paper, building upon the previous research showing that a knowledge requirements monitoring system and the processes behind it can improve the quality of study programs, focuses on application of the monitoring system for extracting and representing industrial requirements using skill frameworks and direct and indirect course and topic rating systems.

Ontology Based Linkage between Enterprise Architecture, Processes, and Time

In an highly dynamic social and business environment time becomes one of the most treasured recourses of companies and individuals. However, there are no many research works devoted to explicit analysis of time issues. Therefore, despite of a large number of enterprise and business process representation and analysis tools, it is still impossible to address time to full extent in systems modeling and analysis. This paper proposes linkage between enterprise architecture, process, and time models to promote development of methods for managing time issues in systems development, maintenance and change management. The linkage roots in Bunge’s systems ontology and concerns time ontology edited by Hobbs and Pan.

Towards Controlling Lawful States and Events in Business Process Models

In enterprises it is important to control whether unlawful events occur or business objects are in unlawful states during business process execution. Existing modelling methods such as BPMN and Archi Mate do not to a full extent support description of conceivable and lawful state and event spaces that can affect execution of the process. This gap jeopardizes compliance of business process models with external and internal regulations. This paper proposes a theoretical solution for closing the gap between business process and enterprise architecture models and conceivable and lawful state and event spaces by using BWW model. BWW model is a generic framework for conceptualization of information system objects.

Towards the Mapping of Multidimensional BPMN Models to Process Definition Standards

Towards the Mapping of Multidimensional BPMN Models to Process Definition Standards Business Process Management (BPM) community has accepted Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as de facto business process modeling standard. In this research BPMN is chosen as the notation for representation of multidimensional business processes, as it uses the set of graphical elements that can be refined with specific attributes, allowing to describe every important aspect of the business process, which can be regarded as the modeling dimension. However, BPMN is only graphical notation and does not support the essence of BPM - full business process lifecycle support: from documenting and modeling to execution and monitoring. To accelerate the adoption of BPM, industry has come forward with two BPMN complementing standards - Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). These two standards are used for different purposes - BPEL is process execution language and XPDL is process exchange language. The problem of mapping BPMN models to BPEL and XPDL is covered in various sources. This paper addresses the issue of mapping BPMN process models in different dimensions to BPEL and XPDL and explores how the structure of BPEL and XPDL is affected after the process is transformed to another dimension. The findings during experiments accomplished in this research can contribute to the creation of the guidelines of how BPMN model in different dimensions can be executed using BPEL or interchanged between different modelling tools. Daudzdimensiju BPMN modeļu kartēšana procesu aprakstu standartos Biznesa procesu vadības (BPV) aprindās Biznesa procesu modelēšanas notācija (BPMN) ir apstiprināta kā de facto biznesa procesu modelēšanas standarts. Šajā rakstā BPMN ir izvēlēta kā notācija daudzdimensiju biznesa procesu modelēšanai, jo BPMN metamodelis ļauj papildināt grafiskos notācijas elementus ar specifiskiem atribūtiem, kas ļauj aprakstīt svarīgākos biznesa procesa aspektus, ko var uzskatīt par modelēšanas dimensijām. Taču, BPMN ir tikai grafiskā notācija un pilnībā neatbalsta pilno biznesa procesa dzīves ciklu - sākot ar dokumentēšanu un modelēšanu un beidzot ar procesu izpildīšanu un monitoringu. Lai sekmētu BPV popularitāti un ātrāku akceptēšanu organizāciju informācijas sistēmu izstrādē, industrijā parādījās vēl divi BPMN papildinošie standarti - BPEL un XPDL. Šie standarti ir bāzēti uz XML, taču tiem ir pilnīgi dažādi uzdevumi - BPEL ir standarts procesu palaišanai un izpildīšanai, savukārt, XPDL ir vienots standarts BPMN modeļu uzglabāšanai un importam/eksportam BPMN rīkos. Ir veikti dažādi pētījumi, kuros ir aprakstīti jautājumi un problēmas, kas saistās ar BPMN kartēšanu uz XPDL un BPEL standartiem. Šā pētījuma mērķis ir noskaidrot, kā mainās BPEL un XPDL procesu definīciju struktūra, pēc BPMN modeļa transformācijas citās dimensijās. Преобразование многомерных BPMN моделей в стандарты описания процессов Общество управления бизнесс процессов приняло BPMN как де -факто стандарт для моделирования бизнесс процессов. В этом исследовании BPMN выбран как основной стандатр для представления многомерных деловых процессов, так как он состоит из набора графических элементов, которые могут быть дополнены специальными атрибутами, позволяя описать каждый важный аспект бизнесс процесса — который может быть расценен, как измерение процесса. Однако, BPMN является только графическим изображением и не поддерживает управление бизнесс процессами — полную поддержку жизненного цикла бизнесс процесса: от документации и моделирования к выполнению и контролю. Чтобы ускорить принятие управления бизнесс процессами, появились два стандарта дополняющие BPMN — Язык Выполнения Делового Процесса (BPEL) и Язык Определения Процесса XML (XPDL). Эти два стандарта используются для различных целей — BPEL язык выполнения процесса и XPDL - язык обмена процесса. Проблема преобразование моделей BPMN на BPEL и XPDL описываеться в различных источниках. Данное иследование изучает как меняется структура BPEL и XPDL для BPMN моделей в различных измерениях.

Towards Supporting Business Process Compliance with Policies

This paper discusses early findings of the research in progress to create an approach to support an organization in bridging the gap between existing business processes and policies. Business processes are valuable assets of any organization, and business process modelling has become the key activity for capturing and analysing business processes. However, advances in technology, growing expectation of openness by research funders, competition, regulations in IT security and privacy, and overall economic situation facilitate emergence of new policies, and urge enterprises to change their business processes to be compliant with the new requirements. The goal of the research is to propose the approach for closing the gap between business process models and legal states of business objects described in policies by means of using Bunge-Wand-Weber model. The approach includes means for explicit definition of legal and illegal state spaces of business objects in (1) policies, and (2) as-is business process models, and compliance checking between state spaces of (1) and (2) to indicate the gap. It is an initial input for building to-be business process models that are complaint with newly imposed policies. As a running example to illustrate the approach a publishing business process of a scholar journal is used. New policies from research funders require Open Access (OA) to all outputs from publicly-funded research, and business processes of publishing scholar journals require changes.

Knowledge service model for business process design

Business processes are key corporate assets both generating and requiring knowledge. During business process modeling phase in order to create an accurate and realistic process model a business process analyst requires existing business process knowledge embedded in internal organizational resources such as documentation and other software artifacts as well as in external resources such as legal documents repositories, standards, regulations and business process frameworks. The aim of this research is to design a service model that will identify and extract knowledge related to business processes from existing external and internal sources and store it as ontology enabling extracted knowledge to be represented in a machine readable format. This research is in the initial analysis phase of the first year of the doctoral studies.