Manu De Backer

Predicting Business/ICT Alignment with AntMiner+

In this paper we report on the results of a European survey on business/ICT alignment practices. The goal of this study is to come up with some practical guidelines for managers on how to strive for better alignment of ICT investments with business requirements. Based on Luftmans alignment framework we examine 18 ICT management practices belonging to 6 different competency clusters. We use AntMiner+, a rule induction technique, to create an alignment rule set. The results indicate that B/ICT alignment is a multidimensional goal which can only be obtained through focused investments covering different alignment aspects. The obtained rule set is an interesting mix of both formal engineering and social interaction processes and structures. We discuss the implication of the alignment rules for practitioners.

Business Process Verification: A Petri Net Approach

In this report, we discuss the use of Petri Net language theory for business process modeling. Essentially, the focus is on the opportunities of the modeling technique for analysis and verification. Semantic compatibility, as opposed to syntactic compatibility, is concerned with the meaningfulness of the distributedbusiness process. We start with a description and motivation of different notions of semantically compatible business processes. Further, these different types ofcompatibility are formalized by means of Petri Net language theory. Finally, we describe the foundations of an algorithm that enables us to verify the semantic compatibility in an automated way.

Building Intelligent Credit Scoring Systems Using Decision Tables

Accuracy and comprehensibility are two important criteria when developing decision support systems for credit scoring. In this paper, we focus on the second criterion and propose the use of decision tables as an alternative knowledge visualisation formalism which lends itself very well to building intelligent and user-friendly credit scoring systems. Starting from a set of propositional if-then rules extracted by a neural network rule extraction algorithm, we construct decision tables and demonstrate their efficiency and user-friendliness for two real-life credit scoring cases.

A Petri Net Formalization of a Publish-Subscribe Process System

Publish/subscribe systems are getting more and more integrated into the execution of business processes in process aware information systems. This integration enables the distribution of the process logic and increases the scalability and adaptability of the process enactment infrastructure. A consequence is however that the original specified process model doesnt accurately represent the actual running process anymore, as the publish/subscribe specific operations are not incorporated into the original model. In this paper we propose a formal model of a publish/subscribe system that can be integrated into a business process model, creating in this way an accurate representation of the actual runtime process. The resulting model can be used for model checking the executable process: inspect system properties, discover problems and validate changes.

Deterministic Petri Net Languages as Business Process Specification Language

Today, a wide variety of techniques have been proposed to model the process aspects of business processes. The problem, however, is that many of these are focused on providing a clear graphical representation of the models and give almost no support for complex verification procedures. Alternatively, the use of Petri Nets as a business process modeling language has been repeatedly proposed. In complex business processes the use of Petri Nets has been criticized and the technique is believed to be unable to capture such processes in all aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the application of Petri Net language theory for business process specification. Petri Net languages are an extension to the Petri Net theory, and they provide a set of techniques to describe complex business processes more efficiently. More specifically, we advocate the application of deterministic Petri Net languages to model the control flow aspects of business processes. The balance between modeling power and analysis possibilities makes deterministic Petri Nets a highly efficient technique, used in a wide range of domains. The proof of their usability, as business process specification language, is given by providing suitable solutions to model the basic and more complex business process patterns [4]. Additionally, some points of particular interest are concisely discussed.