Business Process Model Abstraction

Business process management aims at capturing, understanding, and improving work in organizations. The central artifacts are process models, which serve different purposes. Detailed process models are used to analyze concrete working procedures, while high-level models show, for instance, handovers between departments. To provide different views on process models, business process model abstraction has emerged. While several approaches have been proposed, a number of abstraction use case that are both relevant for industry and scientifically challenging are yet to be addressed. In this paper we systematically develop, classify, and consolidate different use cases for business process model abstraction. The reported work is based on a study with BPM users in the health insurance sector and validated with a BPM consultancy company and a large BPM vendor. The identified fifteen abstraction use cases reflect the industry demand. The related work on business process model abstraction is evaluated against the use cases, which leads to a research agenda.

Business Process Management (BPM) has become one of the most widely used approaches for the design of modern organizational and information systems. The conscious treatment of business processes as significant corporate assets has facilitated substantial improvements in organizational performance but is also used to ensure the conformance of corporate activities. This Handbook presents in two volumes the contemporary body of knowledge as articulated by the world' s leading BPM thought leaders. This first volume focuses on arriving at a sound definition of BPM approaches and examines BPM methods and process-aware information systems. As such, it provides guidance for the integration of BPM into corporate methodologies and information systems. Each chapter has been contributed by leading international experts. Selected case studies complement their views and lead to a summary of BPM expertise that is unique in its coverage of the most critical success factors of BPM. The second edition of this handbook has been significantly revised and extended. Each chapter has been updated to reflect the most current developments. This includes in particular new technologies such as in-memory data and process management, social media and networks. A further focus of this revised and extended edition is on the actual deployment of the proposed theoretical concepts. This volume includes a number of entire new chapters from some of the world's leading experts in the domain of BPM.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2011, held in London, UK, in June 2011. The 42 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 submissions. In addtion the book contains the abstracts of 2 keynote speeches. The contributions are organized in topical sections on requirements; adaptation and evolution; model transformation; conceptual design; domain specific languages; case studies and experiences; mining and matching; business process modelling; validation and quality; and service and management.

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction. Matthias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. To this end, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. After starting with a presentation of general foundations and abstraction models, he explains concepts like process orchestrations and choreographies, as well as process properties and data dependencies. Finally, he presents both traditional and advanced business process management architectures, covering, for example, workflow management systems, service-oriented architectures, and data-driven approaches. In addition, he shows how standards like WfMC, SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture. This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. This 3rd edition contains a new chapter on business decision modelling, covering the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard; the chapter on process choreographies has been streamlined, and numerous clarifications have been fetched throughout the book. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information and additional teaching material.

Business process models are abstractions of concrete operational procedures that occur in the daily business of organizations. To cope with the complexity of these models, business process model abstraction has been introduced recently. Its goal is to derive from a detailed process model several abstract models that provide a high-level understanding of the process. While techniques for constructing abstract models are reported in the literature, little is known about the relationships between process instances and abstract models. In this paper we show how the state of an abstract activity can be calculated from the states of related, detailed process activities as they happen. The approach uses activity state propagation. With state uniqueness and state transition correctness we introduce formal properties that improve the understanding of state propagation. Algorithms to check these properties are devised. Finally, we use behavioral profiles to identify and classify behavioral inconsistencies in abstract process models that might occur, once activity state propagation is used.

Business Process Management (BPM) has become one of the most widely used approaches for the design of modern organizational and information systems. The conscious treatment of business processes as significant corporate assets has facilitated substantial improvements in organizational performance but is also used to ensure the conformance of corporate activities. This Handbook presents in two volumes the contemporary body of knowledge as articulated by the world' s leading BPM thought leaders. This first volume focuses on arriving at a sound definition of Business Process Management approaches and examines BPM methods and process-aware information systems. As such, it provides guidance for the integration of BPM into corporate methodologies and information systems. Each chapter has been contributed by leading international experts. Selected case studies complement these views and lead to a summary of BPM expertise that is unique in its coverage of the most critical success factors of BPM.

[Special Note: If you ordered in early September, please contact www.processmodelingadvisor.com to receive your FREE final-edited copy directly from the author.] Many business process models don't meet expectations. Why? Business analysts, managers, productivity improvement specialists, and consultants who develop process models by trial and error are prone to fail. This is THE only start-to-finish how-to guide for consistently producing high-quality business models. It shows you how to: - Establish or improve your business process modeling competence using the 6-step Universal Process Modeling Procedure. - Perceive, define/normalize any business process or activity using the 4-part Universal Business Process Definition. - Never miss the 3 Basic Business Process Flow elements. - Efficiently elicit process model content using razor-sharp elicitation agendas. - Elicit and model the 10 most common logical process model refinements. - Validate any process model's quality using 5 Universal Process Model Quality Checklists. - Use any process modeling tool at-hand, whether it be white board or process modeling software. Learn more at www.ProcessModelingAdvisor.com

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, BIR 2016, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2016. Overall, 61 submissions from 16 countries were rigorously reviewed by 42 members of the program committee representing 21 countries. The selected 21 full papers and 3 short papers are included in this volume together with 2 abstracts of invited talks. This year again, the papers presented at the conference cover many important aspects of the development, use, and application of management information systems. The papers have been organized in topical sections on Business Processes and Enterprise Modeling; Information Systems Development; Information Systems Management; Learning and Capability; and Data Analysis.