Selmin Nurcan

Key challenges for enabling agile BPM with social software

Business Process Management is called agile when it is able to react quickly and adequately to internal and external events. Agile Business Process Management requires putting the life cycle of business processes on a new paradigm. It is advocated in this paper that social software allows us to satisfy the key requirements for enabling agile BPM by applying the four features of social software: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provision. Organizational and semantic integration and responsiveness (of the business processes engineering, execution and management activities) have been identified as the main requirements for implementing an agile BPM life cycle. Social software may be used in the BPM life cycle in several manners and using numerous approaches. This paper presents seven among them and then analyzes the ‘support’ effects between those approaches and the underlying social software features, and the three requirements for Agile BPM. Copyright

A strategy driven business process modelling approach

– Most of the process models concentrate on who does what, when, i.e. on the description of the operational performance of tasks. The goal driven approaches try to establish a close relationship between the “whys” and the “whats”. The former captures the strategic goals of the organisation whereas the latter tells us how they are achieved through tasks carried out by actors. In addition, managers do not naturally make the distinction between what to achieve (the goal) and the manner to achieve it (the strategy). This confusion often leads to the expression of manners as goals. In order to make clear the fundamental distinction between these two concerns and to master the complexity of process modelling, this paper seeks to propose a goal‐perspective, the map‐driven process modelling approach., – The map representation system conforms to goal models in the fact that it recognises the concept of a goal but departs from those by introducing the concept of strategy to attain a goal., – A business and its supporting system change in a concurrent way. In order to help the propagation of the intentional changes onto operational ones, we adopted the two levels hierarchical spiral process model. The intentional spiral deals with the production of the business process models using the map formalism and the operational one deals with the specifications of the supporting systems., – A business process is defined in terms of goals and strategies of reaching these goals. The approach allows choosing an appropriate level of details when analysing and redesigning business processes.

BPM and Social Software

Social software is software that supports the interaction of human beings and production of artifacts by combining the input from independent contributors without predetermining they way how to do this. Social software enhances business processes by improving the exchange of knowledge and information, to speed up decisions, etc. However, social software can also be used to overcome deficiencies of classic BPM approaches. During the design phase of the BPM life-cycle, social software better integrates the needs of all stakeholders in a more complete way. Using the aggregation mechanisms of social software, constraints for implementation and deployment are captured in finer detail. The aggregation and fusioning of knowledge to cope with incidents is also facilitated by social software. During the evaluation and improve phase, social software highly enhances the collection of suggestions for improvements because each collection can be instantly evaluated by all stakeholders.

Bi-criteria Workflow Tasks Allocation and Scheduling in Cloud Computing Environments

Although there are few efficient algorithms in the literature for scientific workflow tasks allocation and scheduling for heterogeneous resources such as those proposed in grid computing context, they usually require a bounded number of computer resources that cannot be applied in Cloud computing environment. Indeed, unlike grid, elastic computing, such asAmazons EC2, allows users to allocate and release compute resources on-demand and pay only for what they use. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the number of resources is infinite. This feature of Clouds has been called âillusion of infiniteresourcesâ. However, despite the proven benefits of using Cloud to run scientific workflows, users lack guidance for choosing between multiple offering while taking into account several objectives which are often conflicting. On the other side, the workflow tasks allocation and scheduling have been shown to be NP-complete problems. Thus, it is convenient to use heuristic rather than deterministic algorithm. The objective of this paper is to design an allocation strategy for Cloud computing platform. More precisely, we propose three complementary bi-criteria approaches for scheduling workflows on distributed Cloud resources, taking into account the overall execution time and the cost incurred by using a set of resources.

A Decision Making pattern for Guiding the Enterprise Knowledge Development Process

Abstract During enterprise knowledge development in any organisation, developers and stakeholders are faced with situations that require them to make decisions in order to reach their intentions. To help the decision-making process, guidance is required. Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD) is a method offering a guided knowledge development process. The guidance provided by the EKD method is based on a decision-making pattern promoting a situation and intention oriented view of enterprise knowledge development processes. The pattern is iteratively repeated through the EKD process using different types of guiding knowledge. Consequently, the EKD process is systematically guided. The presentation of the decision-making pattern is the purpose of this paper.

A multi-method for defining the organizational change

Abstract The assumption of the work presented in this paper is the situatedness of the change process. The Enterprise Knowledge Development-Change Management Method (EKD-CMM) provides multiple and dynamically constructed ways of working to organize and to guide the change management. The method is built on the notion of labeled graph of intentions and strategies called a road map and the associated guidelines. The EKD-CMM road map is a navigational structure that supports the dynamic selection of the intention to be achieved next and the appropriate strategy to achieve it whereas guidelines help in the operationalization of the selected intention following the selected strategy. This paper presents the EKD-CMM road map and guidelines and exemplifies their use with a real case study.

Intention‐driven modeling for flexible workflow applications

During the early 1990s, workflow technologies were the only ones to offer a transversal integration capacity to the enterprise applications, thus allowing the representation and the enactment of business processes. However, the formalisms developed for workflow specifications were almost systematically activity oriented. Consequently, the resulting process definitions have the advantage to be easily transformable in executable code, but the disadvantage of being prescriptive and rigid. Recent works underline the needs in term of flexible and adaptive workflows, whose execution can evolve according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. In fact, a flexible representation of business processes is an asset to maintain the fit between business processes and their supporting systems in an evolving environment. This article proposes a conceptual framework for an intention-driven modeling of flexible workflow applications. The purpose of the underlying modeling formalism is to define an integration/orchestration for islands of business process chunks and their support systems in order to create and to maintain the fit between them. The modeling framework offers the ability to represent in the same business process definition the well-structured process chunks as well as the ill-structured or ad hoc ones. Copyright

A benchmarking framework for methods to design flexible business processes

The assumption made in this article is that flexible processes require specific design methods. The choice of a method for modelling flexible processes depends on many criteria and situations that we gathered in a benchmarking framework. The user can use it as a decision support tool to choose the appropriate method in order to design flexible business processes in a given project situation. This framework also includes managerial concerns such as the time and the budget of the project. We use three enterprise modelling techniques to illustrate how to use the proposed framework. Copyright

Model Driven Architectures for Enterprise Information Systems

Over the past decade, continuous challenges have been made to traditional business practices. At the same time, organisations have also experienced the effects of the integration and evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT). The Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) gained a new strategic support role as enabler of automation, monitoring, analysis and co- ordination of whole business functioning, a central role in the evolution of today organisations. These rapid changing situations originate a critical need for realistic representations -called business models- of what are the current or future business situations or what should be changed as well as its potential organisational impacts. This paper characterises the strong relationship existing between Business Models and EIS Architectures in a changing environment. Our main contribution is a set of roadmaps, which highlight the relationships between business process models and the requirements of EIS. These roadmaps provide guidance during the business modelling and the information system (IS) modelling processes.

Semantic representation of context models: a framework for analyzing and understanding

Context-aware systems are applications that adapt themselves to several situations involving user, network, data, hardware and the application itself. In this paper, we review several context models proposed in different domains: content adaptation, service adaptation, information retrieval, etc. The purpose of this review is to expose the representation of this notion semantically. According to this, we propose a framework that analyzes and compares different context models. Such a framework intends helping understanding and analyzing of such models, and consequently the definition of new ones. This framework is based on the fact that context-aware systems use context models in order to formalize and limit the notion of context and that relevant information differs from a domain to another and depends on the effective use of this information. Based on this framework, we consider in this paper a particular application domain, Business Processes, in which the notion of context remains unexplored, although it is required for flexibility and adaptability. We propose, in this paper, an ontology-based context model focusing on this particular domain.