Nicolas Pflanzl

Challenges of Social Business Process Management

Social BPM is the practice of actively involving all relevant stakeholders into a BPM endeavor through the use of social software and its underlying principles. This allows enhancing the correctness, completeness, acceptance, and usefulness of process models by leveraging the domain as well as method knowledge of an extensive community of actors. However, the large number and variety of contributors and contributions also gives rise to a number of challenges, which are examined in this paper.

An integrated process for game balancing

Game balancing is a recurring problem that currently requires a lot of manual work, usually following a game designers intuition or rules-of-thumb. To what extent can or should the balancing process be automated? We establish a process model that integrates both manual and automated balancing approaches. Artificial agents are employed to automatically assess the desirability of a game. We demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the model and analyze the resulting solutions from its application to a simple video game.

Designing Serious Games for Citizen Engagement in Public Service Processes

One of the challenges envisioned for eGovernment is how to actively involve citizens in the improvement of public services, allowing governments to offer better services. However, citizen involvement in public service design through ICT is not an easy goal. Services have been deployed internally in public organizations, making it difficult to be leveraged by citizens, specifically those without an IT background. This research moves towards decreasing the gap between public services process opacity and complexity and citizens’ lack of interest or competencies to understand them. The paper discusses game design as an approach to motivate, engage and change citizens’ behavior with respect to public services improvement. The design of a sample serious game is proposed; benefits and challenges are discussed using a public service delivery scenario from Brazil.

A Framework for Fast Graph-Based Pattern Matching in Conceptual Models

We introduce a pattern matching approach for conceptual models suitable for a number of model analysis scenarios like process weakness detection, process compliance checking, syntax verification and model translation. The approach does not depend on any particular modeling language which is achieved by treating conceptual models as labeled graphs. Consequently, we use pattern matching techniques known from algorithmic graph theory - sub graph isomorphism and sub graph homeomorphism. In general, algorithms solving these problems can be computationally expensive. However, special properties of conceptual models such as low tree width and planarity can be exploited to keep computational complexity manageable. This makes pattern matching applicable even to large models typically used in large companies or corporate groups. We introduce a high-level meta algorithm checking structural properties of input models and patterns to decide which low-level pattern matching algorithm will likely deliver search results quickest.