Special section of BPMDS’2015: enabling value creation via business process modeling, development, and support
Softw Syst Model
Special section of BPMDS'2015: enabling value creation via business process modeling, development, and support
Selmin Nurcan 0 1
Rainer Schmidt 0 1
0 Munich University of Applied Sciences , Munich , Germany
1 University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne , Paris , France
The BPMDS series has produced 11 workshops from 1998 to 2010. Nine of these workshops were held in conjunction with CAiSE conferences. From 2011, BPMDS has become a two-day working conference attached to CAiSE (Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering). The topics addressed by the BPMDS series are focused on IT support for business processes. This is one of the keystones of information systems theory. The goals, format, and history of BPMDS can be found on the Web site http://www.bpmds. org/.
Scope
This special section follows the 16th edition of the BPMDS
(business process modeling, development, and support)
series, organized in conjunction with CAISE’15, which
was held in Stockholm, Sweden, June 2015. BPMDS’2015
received 42 submissions from 25 countries, and 17 papers
were selected and published in Springer LNBIP 214 volume.
The theme of BPMDS’2015: “Enabling value creation via
business process modeling, development and support” is part
of a broader discussion on the value contribution of IT [
1
]. In
the literature, different factors enabling value creation from
IT have been identified: appropriate use [
2
], strategic fit [
3
],
IT assets [
1
], and IS processes [
4
]. Following the definition
of [
5
], business process modeling design and support create
value by exploiting opportunities and/or neutralizing threats
in a firm’s environment.
Value can be created in different areas of enterprises [
6
].
Value can be defined as the benefit a customer or supplier
receives from a product or service. More and more business
operators focus on value creation both in the context of
creating better value for customers purchasing its products and
services and for shareholders in the business who want to see
their stake appreciate in value.
Digitization [
7
] creates disruption in economy and
society, and value creation is more critical than ever. Business
process owners and senior IT leaders should make value
creation explicit to maximize opportunities, minimize threats
from digital business disruption, and better meet customer
demands.
Increasingly, producer and consumer interoperate in order
to co-produce [
8–10
]. This breaks with the tayloristic [
11
]
aim to separate the consumer from production in order to
concentrate production and achieve higher economies of scale
only for the producer.
Value creation and BPMDS may potentially influence
one another in multiple ways. More than two decades after
Hammer and Champy [
12
] made the explicit link between
business processes and value, this relationship is still unclear
[
13
]. Companies seem to be more interested in capturing
value from customers than in delivering value to them. Very
often, the main reason for a company to have a business
process in place that delivers value to a customer is to capture a
revenue stream that is indispensable for the company’s
survival.
BPMDS may interact with value creation either in its
entirety or by single disciplines. Value creation may be
fostered by new approaches of process modeling, e.g., [
14
], new
process designs [
15
] or new architectures for business
process support [
16
].
This special section is targeted at both researchers and
practitioners in the information systems community with
a focus on “Enabling value creation via business process
modeling, development and support”. The six papers in this
special section reflect this focus. They are extensively revised
and extended versions of research papers that were
initially presented at the BPMDS’2015 working conference and
passed again a blind review for the special section.
Six selected papers for this special section
The first paper by R. Seiger, S. Huber and T. Schlegel,
“Toward an execution system for self-healing workflows in
cyber-physical systems,” presents an integrated system for
process execution in cyber-physical systems (CPS). The
execution of processes in CPS poses new challenges that
cannot be completely handled by current workflow engines.
The data-centric and event-driven nature of CPS resulting
from the combination of various low-level sensors, actuators,
things, and software components requires process execution
systems that are able to integrate a heterogeneous set of
resources on an active and reactive basis. For CPS, there is a
need to handle the dynamics of resource-constraint, loosely
coupled devices as well as to support user interactions.
The second paper by T. Baier, C. Di Ciccio, J. Mendling,
and M. Weske, “Matching events and activities by
integrating behavioral aspects and label analysis,” observes that
event data, produced by IT services during the execution of
a business process, can be used to analyze the process using
process mining techniques to discover the real process,
measure conformance to a given process model, or to enhance
existing models with performance information. The paper
presented means to help the analyst to identify the mapping
between a process model and events in an event log in a
semi-automated fashion. Defining such a mapping is
generally hard to do manually due to its combinatorial complexity.
The approach presented leverages insights from behavioral
constraints and linguistic analysis to overcome this
complexity.
The third paper by S. Leemans, D. Fahland, and W.M.P.
van der Aalst, “Scalable process discovery and conformance
checking,” focuses on two process mining challenges:
process discovery and conformance checking. Considerable
amounts of data, including process events, are collected and
stored by organizations. Authors target techniques to
handle billions of events or thousands of activities, to produce
sound models, and to guarantee that the underlying process
can be rediscovered when sufficient information is available.
The paper introduces a framework for process discovery that
ensures these properties while passing over the log only once
and introduce three algorithms using the framework.
The fourth paper by A. Burattin, V. Bernstein, M.
Neurauter, P. Soffer, and B. Weber, “Detection and quantification
of flow consistency in business process models,” aims to
empirically identify key visual features of business process
models which are perceived as meaningful to the user and
to show how such features can be quantified into
computational metrics, which are applicable to business process
models. Authors focus on one particular feature, consistency
of flow direction, and show the challenges that arise when
transforming it into a precise metric.
The fifth paper by C. Haisjackl, P. Soffer, S.Y. Lim,
and B. Weber, “How do humans inspect BPMN models: an
exploratory study,” advocates that we do not have an
indepth understanding of how process models are inspected by
humans, what strategies are taken, what challenges arise, and
what cognitive processes are involved. The paper contributes
toward such an understanding and reports an exploratory
study highlighting how humans identify and classify quality
issues in BPMN process models. It investigates the strategies
taken by humans when inspecting a process model, the kinds
of challenges that appear during this process, and different
manners in which classification is addressed.
The sixth paper by S. Schönig, C. Cabanillas, C. Di Ciccio,
S. Jablonski, and J. Mendling, “Mining team compositions for
collaborative work in business processes,” presents a process
mining framework to discover team attributes and
composition patterns of collaborative activities in business processes.
The approach builds upon a declarative process mining
approach focusing on the process resource perspective that
has been extended toward the integration of collaborative
activities. The described approach first extracts the different
teams participating in a collaborative activity from an event
log and then discovers the overall characteristics of the team
members in terms of skills, organizational roles, etc., that are
present in these teams.
Acknowledgements We wish to thank the referees from the
BPMDS’2015 Program Committee members for their timely and
accurate reviews during the two-round and blind review process for this
special section, namely Eric Andonoff, Karsten Boehm, Lars Brehm,
François Charoy, Claude Godart, Chihab Hanachi, Paul Johannesson,
John Krogstie, Michael Möhring, Jen Nimis, Geert Poels, Manfred
Reichert, Iris Reinhartz-Berger, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Shazia Sadiq,
Samira Si-Said Cherfi, Isabelle Wattiau, and Jelena Zdravkovic. We
would like to thank the Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Software and
Systems Modeling for agreeing to publish this special section. We
particularly would like to thank Martin Schindler for his support in helping
us put this special section together. Our gratitude goes to all authors of
selected papers from BPMDS’2015 who made this special section
possible by submitting their work and revising it according to the reviewers’
comments.
Special section of BPMDS’2015: enabling value creation via business process modeling…
Rainer Schmidt is a professor
for business information systems
at Munich University of Applied
Sciences. He has a Ph.D. and an
engineering degree in computer
science. His current research
areas include service science,
enterprise computing, business
process management, social
software, business/IS alignment, and
the integration of these themes.
He has industrial experience
as management consultant and
researcher. Rainer Schmidt is
coorganizer of the BPMDS
working conference at CAISE, the BPMS2 workshop series at BPM since
2008, the SoEA4EE workshop series in EDOC since 2009, and member
of the program committee of several workshops and conferences. Rainer
Schmidt is serving on the editorial boards of International Journal of
Information Systems in the Service Sector and International Journal on
Advances in Internet Technology. Rainer Schmidt applies his research
in a number of projects and cooperation with industry.
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BPMDS series at CAISE since 2007 , the BPMS2 workshop series at BPM since 2008 , and the SoEA4EE workshop series at EDOC since 2009 . She is serving on the editorial board of several international journals such us International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design , International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector , Requirements Engineering Journal, and she is the associate editor of the e-journal on Advances in Enterprise Systems .