Discovery and analysis of e-mail-driven business processes

E-mail is used as the primary tool for business communication and collaboration. This paper presents a novel e-mail interaction mining method to discover and analyze e-mail-driven business processes. An e-mail-driven business process is perceived as a human collaboration process that consists of interactions between people who may each play different roles. The notion of message threads (i.e. sets of e-mail messages that are replies to each other) is used as the fundamental building block to construct the interactions in the e-mail-driven business process. The proposed method adopts an interaction-centric business process modeling language to visualize the discovered e-mail-driven business process. The method identifies message threads from an e-mail archive, and constructs an interaction-centric process model based on the temporal order and similarity of the threads. Process-related information is extracted from e-mail header fields. A software tool, named E-mail Interaction Miner, implements the proposed method. A case study is used to apply and evaluate the method on a set of e-mails collected from a Dutch gas transport company. The evaluation results are discussed. These results comprise business process improvement opportunities for the case organization, and contributions to theory and language development.     

A systematic review on security in Process-Aware Information Systems – Constitution,challenges, and future directions

ContextSecurity in Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) has gained increased attention in current research and practice. However, a common understanding and agreement on security is still missing. In addition, the proliferation of literature makes it cumbersome to overlook and determine state of the art and further to identify research challenges and gaps. In summary, a comprehensive and systematic overview of state of the art in research and practice in the area of security in PAIS is missing.ObjectiveThis paper investigates research on security in PAIS and aims at establishing a common understanding of terminology in this context. Further it investigates which security controls are currently applied in PAIS.MethodA systematic literature review is conducted in order to classify and define security and security controls in PAIS. From initially 424 papers, we selected in total 275 publications that related to security and PAIS between 1993 and 2012. Furthermore, we analyzed and categorized the papers using a systematic mapping approach which resulted into 5 categories and 12 security controls.ResultsIn literature, security in PAIS often centers on specific (security) aspects such as security policies, security requirements, authorization and access control mechanisms, or inter-organizational scenarios. In addition, we identified 12 security controls in the area of security concepts, authorization and access control, applications, verification, and failure handling in PAIS. Based on the results, open research challenges and gaps are identified and discussed with respect to possible solutions.ConclusionThis survey provides a comprehensive review of current security practice in PAIS and shows that security in PAIS is a challenging interdisciplinary research field that assembles research methods and principles from security and PAIS. We show that state of the art provides a rich set of methods such as access control models but still several open research challenges remain.     

A formal representation for context-aware business processes

A business process is a set of activities performed in a coordinated manner within an organizational and technical environment that is aimed toward a business goal. The flexibility of a process is related to an understanding of the unexpected events that occur when people, systems and resources interact and require adjustments. Thus, business processes must be designed to respond to information about different events and their specificity. This information defines what the literature calls “context”. To broaden the perception of context in the case of a business process, this work proposes an approach to characterize the context of a business process activity in a given domain through conceptual models structured in layers. A case study was conducted to evaluate the proposal, which provided evidence of the applicability of the model.     

基于DW和OLAP的税务决策支持系统的方案设计

目前税务部门都建立起了面向事务处理的税收征管信息系统(OLTP系统).但这些系统缺乏对历史数据的有效分析和利用,很难为决策者提供综合的、高效的辅助决策信息,因此提出了采用数据仓库技术和联机分析技术实现税务征管信息化的解决方案.为税务部门决策科学化、理性化提供可靠保障.提升税收工作的计划、决策、执行、监控和管理能力.     

一个商品库存管理信息系统设计与实现技术

本文介绍了商品库存管理系统的软硬件系统环境结构及系统的结构分布,对系统的业务处理进行了分段阐述,探讨了一些计算机技术在商业库存管理中的应用问题。     

基于超图的企业过程的描述和简化原理

企业的一项重要任务就是对现有企业过程进行有效的改善和革新。这项工作设计是为了达到减少成本、提高质量和效率而进行的企业过程的简化和减少非增值过程的两项活动。提出一种利用超图理论对企业过程描述和简化的方法。首先通过带参数的有向超图为企业过程模型;然后根据最小化等超图理论总结出过程优化的三条规则,用于简化企业过程,识别和减少非增值活动。     

基于Petri网化简方法的工作流模型验证

经营过程的建模、分析与优化是支持企业经营过程重组（BPR）的重要基础,行之有 效的模型分析方法是成功进行模型分析的重要的关键技术问题．在深入分析了经营过程工作 流模型特点的基础上,本文提出了一种基于Petri 网图形化简规则的业务过程模型分析与验 证方法,证明了所提出这套化简规则的完备性和多项式时间的复杂性．并应用一个实例证明 了所提出方法的有效性．     

From Business Intelligence to semantic data stream management

The Semantic Web technologies are being increasingly used for exploiting relations between data. In addition, new tendencies of real-time systems, such as social networks, sensors, cameras or weather information, are continuously generating data. This implies that data and links between them are becoming extremely vast. Such huge quantity of data needs to be analyzed, processed, as well as stored if necessary. In this position paper, we will introduce recent work on Real-Time Business Intelligence combined with semantic data stream management. We will present underlying approaches such as continuous queries, data summarization and matching, and stream reasoning.     

企业管理的业务流程重组

随着计算机技术、网络信息化的发展与成熟，企业正在向信息化管理转变。企业在引进、实施管理信息化的过程中，面临了管理模式差异的挑战。本文通过实例来说明企业在构建管理信息化平台的同时，会出现管理模式及业务流程的差异，可通过业务流程重组技术来协调这些差异，井提出了该差异解决的方案。     

Business process integration as a solution to the implementation of supply chain management systems

In the domain of supply chain management (SCM), various software packages have been developed for planning business strategies. To solve the problem of system productivity in applying planning packages, we propose a solution concept, business process integration (BPI), which fuses workflow and enterprise application integration (EAI) technology. Two characteristic policies are included in BPI. The first is to design the minimum set of business processes for real-time information sharing with planning packages without changing other processes. The second is to integrate several systems with EAI technology and to manage their execution with a workflow tool. Based on these policies, we propose various design templates and integration adapters. Our evaluation shows that using BPI, a target system can be developed with less manpower, in less time, and with higher quality than previous methods.