A view framework for modeling and change validation of artifact-centric inter-organizational business processes

Over the past several years, more efficient approaches have been on increasing demands for designing, modeling, and implementing inter-organizational business processes. In the process collaboration across organizational boundaries, organizations still stay autonomic, which means each organization can freely modify its internal operations to meet its private goals while satisfying the mutual objectives with its partners. Recently, artifact-centric process modeling has been evidenced with higher flexibility in process modeling and execution than traditional activity-centric modeling methods. Although some efforts have been put to exploring how artifact-centric modeling facilitates the collaboration between organizations, the achievement is still far from satisfaction level, particularly in aspects of process modeling and validating. To fill in the gaps, we propose a view framework for modeling and validating the changes of inter-organizational business processes. The framework consists of an artifact-centric process meta-model, public view constructing mechanism, and private view and change validating mechanisms, which are specially designed to facilitate the participating organizations to customize their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of the collaborating processes. We also implement a software tool named Artifact-M to help organizations to automatically construct a minimal and consistent public view from their processes.     

协同业务过程与需求的建模及一致性验证

自底向上建模方法中的业务过程由不同组织开发,无法在设计阶段就预见其潜在的所有交互可能.因此,在实际协作中,建立协同业务过程可能与参与组织期望的系统功能和特性不一致.为此,提出一种协同业务过程与需求的建模及一致性验证方法.首先,引入并发操作符,提供一种通过组合参与组织的业务过程构建协同业务过程方法;然后,扩展目标模型,提出需求依赖图来建模参与组织的需求;最后,基于模型检测技术提出协同业务过程与需求一致性检测方法.重点解决了将协同业务过程转换为表达能力相同FSP进程规约和参与组织需求转换为LTL公式这两个问题.通过对典型的协同业务过程集阐述提出方法的有效性,并对方法分析效率进行评价,结果表明：相对已有工作,提出方法能够更加有效地用于协同业务过程与需求的一致性分析.     

协同业务过程的随机行为分析方法

参与组织随机行为是评价业务协同有效实施的一个关键因素。结合进程代数和马尔科夫链,提出了一种协同业务过程的随机行为分析方法。首先,使用有限状态自动机建模每个参与组织的业务过程,通过引入异步消息通信关系定义协同业务过程。其次,提出将参与组织业务过程转换成通信顺序进程（Communication Sequential Process,CSP）方法,进而将每个参与组织业务过程对应CSP进程并发组合得到协同业务过程对应的CSP进程,并根据CSP操作语义构建协同业务过程的状态迁移模型。最后,引入状态迁移模型正则化概念,从理论上证明正则化的状态迁移模型与一个齐次马尔科夫链相对应,进而根据平衡方程求得状态迁移系统中每个状态的稳定概率,以此为基础实现参与组织随机行为分析。通过对电设备采购过程建模与随机行为分析阐述该方法的可行性和有效性。     

Ensuring reliability in B2B services: Fault tolerant inter-organizational workflows

In the age of Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration, ensuring reliability of workflows underlying inter-organizational business processes is of significant importance. There are, however, quite a few challenges towards achieving seamless operation. Such challenges arise from heterogeneity in infrastructure and coordination mechanism at participant organizations, as well as time and cost associated with recovery from failure. Our research presents foundations for a reliable scheme for recovery from failure of workflow processes spanning through multiple business entities. First, a system model is adapted from the mobile computing literature that serves to establish the requirements to be enforced by each participating organization. In our model, we adopt the Maximal Sequence Path (MSP) approach from Yoo et al. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2132:222–236, 2001), as a means of decomposing workflows into mobile agent-driven processes that communicate via web services at each organization. This decomposition ensures defining logical points within the dynamics of a workflow instance for locating accurate and consistent states of the system for recovery in case of a failure. Then, a set of algorithms for various business scenarios are developed and presented as practical solutions. These algorithms are shown to create checkpoints such that the system is always in a globally consistent state. As such, these algorithms constitute a set of standards that can be incorporated in business process management suites that support reliable inter-organizational collaboration.     

A secure collaboration service for dynamic virtual organizations

Nowadays, various promising paradigms of distributed computing over the Internet, such as Grids, P2P and Clouds, have emerged for resource sharing and collaboration. To enable resources sharing and collaboration across different domains in an open computing environment, virtual organizations (VOs) often need to be established dynamically. However, the dynamic and autonomous characteristics of participating domains pose great challenges to the security of virtual organizations. In this paper, we propose a secure collaboration service, called PEACE-VO, for dynamic virtual organizations management. The federation approach based on role mapping has extensively been used to build virtual organizations over multiple domains. However, there is a serious issue of potential policy conflicts with this approach, which brings a security threat to the participating domains. To address this issue, we first depict concepts of implicit conflicts and explicit conflicts that may exist in virtual organization collaboration policies. Then, we propose a fully distributed algorithm to detect potential policy conflicts. With this algorithm participating domains do not have to disclose their full local privacy policies, and is able to withhold malicious internal attacks. Finally, we present the system architecture of PEACE-VO and design two protocols for VO management and authorization. PEACE-VO services and protocols have successfully been implemented in the CROWN test bed. Comprehensive experimental study demonstrates that our approach is scalable and efficient.     

Towards Collaboration Maturity in Business Processes: An Exploratory Study in Oil Production Processes

Abstract

Organizations have been relying on collaboration for knowledge sharing and productivity improvement in order to reduce costs or boost revenue. However, organizations still cannot assure that collaboration is properly conducted in daily work. This paper presents an approach to stimulating collaboration between professionals in an organization. The approach, combining a BPM methodology with the CollabMM collaboration maturity model and its corresponding method, is a result of an exploratory study in a real setting in an oil company in Brazil. The project is a move towards improving decision-making during one of the company's business processes and establishing collaboration among professionals through information sharing.     

Plural: A decentralized business process modeling method

Top-down and centralized approaches prevail in the design and improvement of business processes. However, centralized structures pose difficulties for organizations in adapting to a rapidly changing business environment. Here we present the Plural method which can be used to guide organizations in performing process modeling in a decentralized way. Instead of a centralized group of people understanding, modeling and improving processes, our method allows individuals to model and improve their own processes to help in fulfilling their roles in the organization. An individual model depicts a set of activities performed by a role, which together result in a cohesive service within the organization. These individual models are then integrated as necessary to show the way the organization works. We applied the Plural method in a case study of a small-size software organization. We describe the method and its underlying principles and then discuss the findings of our case study, lessons learned, and limitations. The study thus provided evidence of Plural's utility and showed how an organization might exploit its strengths.     

业务过程协同中数据恢复策略建模及分析

业务过程协同允许组织之间彼此进行通信,交互和协作以完成特定的业务目标。为了确保实施的正确性和一致性,需要对业务过程协同进行建模和分析,但现有的工作鲜有关注于从架构的视角和数据的层次来对其进行讨论。为此,首先提出了一种“代理端 盟主端”业务过程协同架构;其次,通过对该协同架构进行分析,提出了一种业务过程协同的数据恢复通用模型;最后,基于该通用模型,提出了数据恢复策略模型,以此为基础提出了五种数据恢复策略并采用随机Petri网对其进行建模与仿真。实验结果表明,采用最短队列随机恢复策略能够使得业务过程协同应用在协同中确保高的系统吞吐量、快的响应时间及低的拒绝率。     

Caramba—A Process-Aware Collaboration System Supporting Ad hoc and Collaborative Processes in Virtual Teams

Organizations increasingly define many business processes as projects executed by virtual (project) teams, where team members from within an organization cooperate with outside experts. Virtual teams require and enable people to collaborate across geographical distance and professional (organizational) boundaries and have a somewhat stable team configuration with roles and responsibilities assigned to team members. Different people, coming from different organizations will have their own preferences and experiences and cannot be expected to undergo a long learning cycle before participating in team activities. Thus, efficient communication, coordination, and process-aware collaboration remain a fundamental challenge. In this paper we discuss the current shortcomings of approaches in the light of virtual teamwork (mainly Workflow, Groupware, and Project Management) based on models and underlying metaphors. Furthermore, we present a novel approach for virtual teamwork by tightly integrating all associations between processes, artifacts, and resources. In this paper we analyze (a) the relevant criteria for process-aware collaboration system metaphors, (b) coordination models and constructs for organizational structures of virtual teams as well as for ad hoc and collaborative processes composed out of tasks, and (c) architectural considerations as well as design and implementation issues for an integrated process-aware collaboration system for virtual teams on the Internet.     

Integrating constraints to support legally flexible business processes

Flexible collaboration is a notable attribute of Web 2.0, which is often in the form of multiple users participating different activities that together complete a whole business process. In such an environment, business processes may be dynamically customized or adjusted, as well as the participants may be selected or attend uncertainly. So how to ensure the legitimacy of a business process for both security and business is increasingly critical. In this paper, we investigate this problem and introduce a novel method to support legally flexible business processes. The proposed Constraint-based Business Process Management Model incorporates constraints into the standard activities composing a business process, where the security constraints place restrictions on participants performing the activities and business constraints restrict the dependencies between multiple activities. By the assembly operations, business processes can be dynamically generated and adjusted with activities, that are obliged to the specified constraints. Several algorithms are presented to verify the consistency of constraints and the soundness of the generated business processes, as well as to perform the execution planning to guarantee the correct execution of a business process on the precondition of satisfying all constraints. We present an illustrative example and implement a prototype for the proposed model that is an application of property rights exchange for supporting legal business processes.     

An enterprise integration methodology

As more and more organizations pursue the benefits of e-business, they are looking to a process called enterprise integration, or EI, as a key technical enabler in transforming their business processes. A typical form of EI is Webification; in this scenario, a company wants to offer its existing products and services over the Internet, so it builds Web front-end systems and integrates them to its backend legacy systems. (In this article, we use "legacy system" to mean any IT system already in operation.) A more complex El scenario involves enterprise application integration. By this process, the organization links up previously separate and isolated systems to give them greater leverage. For example, an organization might integrate a customer-relationship-management system, a call center system, and legacy customer account systems to give the organization a consolidated view of its customers. An emerging EI scenario is business-to-business (B2B) integration (also called extended enterprise models), which occurs when an organization integrates its own business processes with those of its business partners to improve efficiency within a collaborative value chain.     

Strategy-;driven reuse: Bringing reuse from the Engineering Department to the Executive Boardroom

Organizations have predominantly utilized reuse in Engineering Departments for the purposes of reducing the cost and improving the quality of the software they develop. While these strategies have been successful, we believe that the full potential of reuse can only be tapped when reuse is brought to the Executive Boardroom as well. We propose that organizations tap reuse not only for cutting costs, but also for strategic and wide-;ranging business initiatives such as entering new markets, increasing agility in response to a dynamic marketplace, and competitive positioning and advantage. In order to do so effectively, organizations must harness the potential of reuse by migrating reuse into the company's business and product-;line planning processes. We present a framework for analyzing and changing reuse business practices. Such practices include cost-;reduction reuse, when the organization utilizes reuse for cost savings purposes; reuse-;enabled business, when the organization uses reuse to create new business opportunities; and strategy-;driven reuse, when the organization incorporates reuse in the formulation of its business and product-;line strategy for the purposes of obtaining competitive positioning and advantage. To determine whether or not reuse is the proper software development strategy to pursue, we utilize concepts in competitive software engineering, an integrated approach to software development that is attuned to the competitive demands of the marketplace. First, a framework is established by identifying and analyzing the organization's goals, strengths, and limitations, its market and its competitive environment. Based on these analyses, possible business or product strategies are formulated and one or more are chosen that help achieve the organization's goals. Finally, a development strategy is chosen. Following this choice, each step of the decision cycle should be re-;evaluated to ensure that it is consistent with the chosen development strategy.     

Knowledge-based system for collaborative process specification

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the design of a collaborative business process model (CBP). This CBP is considered as a specification of needs in order to build a collaboration information system (CIS) for a network of organizations. The study is a part of a model-driven engineering approach of the CIS in a specific enterprise interoperability framework that will be summarised. An adaptation of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is used to represent the CBP model. We develop a knowledge-based system (KbS) which is composed of three main parts: knowledge gathering, knowledge representation and reasoning, and collaborative business process modelling. The first part starts from a high abstraction level where knowledge from business partners is captured. A collaboration ontology is defined in order to provide a structure to store and use the knowledge captured. In parallel, we try to reuse generic existing knowledge about business processes from the MIT Process Handbook repository. This results in a collaboration process ontology that is also described. A set of rules is defined in order to extract knowledge about fragments of the CBP model from the two previous ontologies. These fragments are finally assembled in the third part of the KbS. A prototype of the KbS has been developed in order to implement and support this approach. The prototype is a computer-aided design tool of the CBP. In this paper, we will present the theoretical aspects of each part of this KbS as well as the tools that we developed and used in order to support its functionalities.     

Incorporating technology in service-oriented i* business models: a case study

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to enterprise information systems. This interest is motivated by the need for achieving better integration of new technologies (hardware and software) with the business processes of an organization. Business processes have become more and more dependent on technologies because technology has a direct impact on business processes, changing the way they are performed and thus also affecting the way analysts design the software system. However, at the present time, there are still some gaps between the definition of business processes and the technologies used in the organization. In practice, organizations have carried out their business processes using different technologies; however, it is sometimes not possible to determine how technologies are useful in achieving current business goals. This is because business models do not explicitly consider the technologies in the organizational requirements. The goal of this paper is to present a systematic process for integrating business processes and technologies at the conceptual level. To validate our approach, we present a case study that describes the processes of the inventory management department of a public research center.     

CorPN: managing instance correspondence in collaborative business processes

Driven by the booming global business, organisations are required to align their business processes into an inter-connected network. The sophisticated nature of collaboration results in dynamic and complex interactions and correlations between participating business processes. This inevitably poses challenges to business process management in terms of recognising the instance correspondence and analysing the interaction behaviours of collaborative business processes. Nevertheless, this issue has received very limited attention from inter-organisational workflow research. In this paper, a novel correspondence Petri net model called CorPN is developed to specify instance correspondence with extensions to classical WF-Nets. In addition, a method is established to analyse the behavioural properties of CorPN nets for the purpose of process verification and examination.     

Properties that influence business process management maturity and its effect on organizational performance

BPM maturity is a measure to evaluate how professionally an organization manages its business processes. Previous research provides evidence that higher BPM maturity leads to better performance of processes and of the organization as a whole. It also claims that different organizations should strive for different levels of maturity, depending on their properties. This paper presents an empirical investigation of these claims, based on a sample of 120 organizations and looking at a selection of organizational properties. Our results reveal that higher BPM maturity contributes to better performance, but only up to a point. Interestingly, it contradicts the popular belief that higher innovativeness is associated with lower BPM maturity, rather showing that higher innovativeness is associated with higher BPM maturity. In addition, the paper shows that companies in different regions have a different level of BPM maturity. These findings can be used as a benchmark and a motivation for organizations to increase their BPM maturity.     

Hierarchical hippocratic databases with minimal disclosure for virtual organizations

The protection of customer privacy is a fundamental issue in today’s corporate marketing strategies. Not surprisingly, many research efforts have proposed new privacy-aware technologies. Among them, Hippocratic databases offer mechanisms for enforcing privacy rules in database systems for inter-organizational business processes (also known as virtual organizations). This paper extends these mechanisms to allow for hierarchical purposes, distributed authorizations and minimal disclosure supporting the business processes of virtual organizations that want to offer their clients a number of ways to fulfill a service. Specifically, we use a goal-oriented approach to analyze privacy policies of the enterprises involved in a business process. On the basis of the purpose hierarchy derived through a goal refinement process, we provide algorithms for determining the minimum set of authorizations needed to achieve a service. This allows us to automatically derive access control policies for an inter-organizational business process from the collection of privacy policies associated with different participating enterprises. By using effective on-line algorithms, the derivation of such minimal information can also be done on-the-fly by the customer wishing to access a service.This is an expanded and revised version of [20].     

The conundrum of IT management

This paper presents a robust argument as to why it can be difficult for chief information officers (CIOs) to generate business value from investments that their organizations make in information technology (IT) with contemporary organizational structures, authority patterns, processes and mindsets. This argument is built on the subtle premise that organizations should not seek to merely manage IT but to manage the delivery of business value through IT. It takes the view that this latter quest is knowledge-based and that the knowledge resources to successfully deliver this value are distributed throughout the organization. Crucially, this knowledge is not located solely within the IT function, presenting a challenge for the CIO for its integration and coordination. With the CIO having little or no jurisdiction over all required knowledge, its deployment will therefore be fragmented. The conundrum of IT management is how to generate value through IT without having access and authority over necessary resources. Research and practitioner implications of this analysis are highlighted.     

A quantitative and qualitative study of the link between business process management and digital innovation

The information revolution leaves its mark on businesses, resulting in organizations looking for digital innovation (DI) to apply to their business processes and anticipate competitors. Since the interplay between business process management (BPM) and DI has been underdeveloped, this mixed-methods article investigates the strength and nature of the relationship. We supplement the findings of an international survey (stage 1) with explanations from an expert panel (stage 2) to generalize a positive yet moderate link because of manifold contextual factors affecting strategic decision-making. We extend the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework and profile organizations along their digital process innovation (DPI) mastery in a readiness matrix.     

A Web-Service based framework for analyzing and measuring business performance

The web services paradigm provides organizations with an environment to enhance B2B communications. The aim is to create modularized services supporting the business processes within their organization and also those external entities participating in these same business processes. Current web service frameworks do not include the functionality required for web service execution performance measurement from an organization perspective. As such, a shift to this paradigm is at the expense of the organizations performance knowledge, as this knowledge will become buried within the internal processing of the web service platform. This research introduces an approach to reclaim and improve this knowledge for the organization establishing a framework that enables the definition of web services from a performance measurement perspective, together with the logging and analysis of the enactment of web services. This framework utilizes web service concepts, DSS principles, and agent technologies, to enable feedback on the organizations performance measures through the analysis of the web services. A key benefit of this work is that the data is stored once but provides information both to the customer and the supplier of a web service, removing the need for development of internal web service performance monitoring.