Sonia Ayachi Ghannouchi

Evaluation of the Criteria and Indicators that Determine Quality in Higher Education: A Questionnaire Proposal

Higher education is one of the important fields for development in the economic world. Therefore, it must be based on excellence methodologies and managed by a reliable quality approach. That is why; we must encourage the culture of quality within higher education institutions to make management transparent and understandable by all stakeholders (students, teachers). However, despite the changes and the importance in literature, defining the quality concept in higher education remains vague and unclear. Furthermore, leading a quality approach to allow these institutions to adapt to change and the current needs remains difficult. To remedy to these problems, we expect in this paper to define quality in higher education. After that, we identify a set of typical and consistent criteria, with specific indicators for each criterion, considered as substantial, focusing on the needs of stakeholders with the aim of achieving a good quality. These requirements are established by first passing through a preliminary study based on a questionnaire designed to assess the importance attributed to the criteria mentioned. The responses given to this questionnaire will be analyzed in order to identify the quality indicators and to measure from the experts point of view their relative importance.

Improvement of Quality for Business Process Modeling Driven by Guidelines

Abstract The improvement of quality in business process models should be objective by applying measures. However, an evaluation of measurement results is not a simple task. It also requires the identification of relevant threshold values and indicators, which make it possible to distinguish between different levels of quality for BP models. In this context, a prototype named BPMoQualAssess (Business Process Model Quality Assess) is described. This prototype is including useful metrics defining the syntactic aspect of BP models also their threshold values. The obtained results are guidelines containing recommendations that aim at improving an input model by modifying it in order to obtain a higher level of quality.

Customization of multi-tenant learning process as a service with Business Process Feature Model

Abstract Cloud computing has a model for utility computing that promotes on-demand scalability, flexible application deployment and reuse. It also promotes multi-tenancy for efficient resource utilization by sharing hardware and software infrastructure among multiple users. Multi-tenant applications running on a cloud infrastructure are provided to clients as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) over the network. In this context, Software product lines (SPL) promote reusable application development for product families. On the other hand, business processes of most organizations are automated to support the advanced workflow management systems. In the context of the e-learning applications, it is perfectly suitable to manage the e-learning application by automating the e-learning process to effectively manage multiple tenants’ (institutions/teachers) ever changing requirements. As the available LMSs such as Moodle, Claroline and WebCT do not satisfy all the needs of different institutions/teachers, their demand is to develop their own systems. Cloud-based applications can be modeled as Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaas) families similar to the SPL products. As SPL development techniques rely on feature models to describe the commonality and variability of family member applications, such techniques can be used to model variability in BPaas. This paper proposes a generative multi-tenant e-learning process, that utilizes Business Process Feature Model (BPFM) approach which is a combination of SPL approach and BPM approach for modeling the reconfigurable e-learning process with multi-tenancy capabilities in cloud computing (BPaas).

A Guidance System for Business Process Flexibility.

During the last decades, flexibility has gained a strong presence, in a variety of disciplines, mainly in the BPM field. The real challenge for BPM consists in providing modeling paradigms and BPMSs with adequate information and features to deal with the often conflicting requirements of flexibility. In this setting, we focus on providing a guidance approach for enhancing business process flexibility. Our purpose is therefore to perceive which modeling paradigm(s) and/or business process management system(s) (BPMS(s)) are the most adequate to the specific organization needs in terms of flexibility. This approach was implemented in a plug-in named BPFlexGuide. To evaluate this approach, we have studied the emergency care (EC) process. Users interested in the EC process were guided to use the AristaFlow BPM suite BPMS. The results of this study would help designers to choose the best paradigms and BPMS that best fit their needs on flexibility.

Exploring the Integration of Business Process with Nosql Databases in the Context of BPM

Business process is defined as a set of interrelated tasks or activities which allows the fulfillment of one of the organization’s objectives. Modeling business process can be applied in several domains such as healthcare, business, education, etc. Modeling such process allows to facilitate and understand the functioning of corresponding systems. Steps in the process need input data and generate new output data. Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) play the role to model, configure and execute business processes. These latters are facing new challenges toward big data area. Data in business process originate from multiple sources with a variety of formats and are generated in a high speed and hence need in one hand, a storage infrastructure gathering all data types and forms. And on the other hand, analytics infrastructure that makes those data ready for analysis is needed. Therefore, regarding the flexibility and the dynamics of the execution of learning process, Not Only SQL (NoSQL) databases should be taken into consideration. So, the idea of combining business process and NoSQL databases becomes one merging and critical research area. In this paper, we propose the adoption of a Nosql database schema with MongoDB to model learning data in the context of MOOCs. Then, we explore the idea of integrating such database with the designed and configured massive learning process.

Towards Managing Key Performance Indicators for Measuring Business Process Performance

Organizations always need to continually improve and review their critical business processes (BP), especially in the healthcare field. This improvement requires an efficient mean to support the management and the analysis of healthcare processes, to collect all relevant indicators designed for both effective management and process improvement and to understand all interesting results based on data instance logs that reflect the performance of business processes. In order to meet these challenges, we propose a novel approach for managing business process performance enabling the evaluation and optimization of BPs. This approach is illustrated through a real case study in the emergency department of “Farhat Hached” hospital in Sousse (Tunisia).

Software Product Line to Express Variability in E-Learning Process

As a consequence of the massive adoption of internet, many platforms such as Moodle, WebCT and Claroline aim to ease and improve the teaching/learning process by means of taking advantage of internet technologies. However, available systems do not satisfy all the needs of different institutions/teachers, which push them to develop their own systems. Our contribution is the proposition of a general model for collaborative learning processes. The proposed process is modeled with the BPFM (Business Process Feature Model) notation which is a combination of BPMN (Business Process Model Notation) and FM (Feature Model). In fact, BPMN offers almost no means to model process variability. It becomes then necessary to find an efficient solution that allows the fast development of systems and overcomes the afore-mentioned issues. We strongly believe that adopting a software product line (SPL) approach in e-Learning domain can bring important benefits. Knowing that Business Process Management (BPM) is a potential domain in which Software Product Line (SPL) can be successfully applied, we propose in this paper to use the Business Process Feature Model (BPFM) notation that combines in a new notation concepts coming both from feature modeling and from BP modeling to create a reusable and reconfigurable e-learning process.

Modeling Emergency Care Process Taking into Account Its Flexibility

It is widely recognized that the development of business processes (BPs), in the healthcare field, has a deep need of BP flexibility. This is due to changes that take place frequently. Hence, flexibility is one of the most overriding concepts in Healthcare. Since the Emergency departments are very complex, the processes structure has to be dynamically adapted and changed, specifically when dealing with crisis and disasters such as terrorist attack, earthquake, and hurricane, which often affect a high number of people. In such cases, the execution of the established plans is often perturbed. To allow flexible emergency care (EC) processes modeling, we have chosen the AristaFlow BPM suite as well as jBPM BPMSs.

An Approach for Measuring Flexibility of Business Processes Based on Distances Between Models and Their Variants

The strong and fast competitions in which organizations are involved lead them to frequently change and adapt their business processes. In fact, business process flexibility has been one of the richest topics in business process management for the last two decades, as it gathers all efforts to allow for changes in certain parts of the process, while keeping others stable. Nevertheless, such changes may lead, in turn, to a large number of process variants derived from the same process model, but differing in structure. In this paper, we propose a quantitative approach to measure the flexibility of business processes regarding their different perspectives: functional, operational, behavioral, informational and organizational. We define therefore the perspective-based distances, which is based on computing change operations. The resulting measures can help organizations to better understand how much flexibility do their business processes enclose, taking into account the model variants they’ve been using. To exemplify our approach, we used a real-world emergency care process as a case study.

Enhancing business process flexibility in an emergency care process

Business Process Management (BPM) is being increasingly adopted to streamline healthcare service delivery and management processes. Emergency departments (ED) are very complex. To operate effectively and create value, EDs must be flexible and have the ability to rapidly adapt to the highly variable needs of patients. In this paper, we provide models for a real-world scenario emergency care (EC) process, and elicit its flexibility needs using interviews with the EC process participants. We then use a guidance tool to help with the choice of the most suitable Business Process Management System (BPMS), regarding the flexibility needs elicited. We validate this choice by modelling the new flexibility enhanced EC process with one of the advised BPMSs, and analyse its support regarding the elicited flexibility needs.