Context Of Business Processes Research Articles

The Digital Platform Promotion Strategy To Support UMKM In Bangka Belitung Province

Since the COVID-19 pandemic entered Indonesia in early March 2020, theeconomy had stopped, thus affecting the socio-economic life of the community.With the pandemic, people's lives are mostly done at home (Work from Home)so that the use of digital platform technology in helping companies work on alarge and small scale, especially in small and medium enterprises in the startupworld. In the promotion strategy by utilizing it is also necessary to use a businessintelligence model which is an analytical tool in the form of business informationthat is used to consolidate, analyze, store and access a lot of data in the contextof business processes that lead to making decisions and actions with the aim ofimproving the performance of business or business strategies in the future.UMKM, especially in the province of Bangka Belitung. Therefore, we intend tocarry out service in educating the public with the theme "digital platformpromotion strategy to support UMKM in Bangka Belitung Province" which aimsto review the use of digital platform technology and the benefits of BusinessIntelligence in the digital business era.

An operational support approach for Mining Unstructured Business Processes

The refined process mining framework contains a set of activities that use extracted information from event logs, discovered models and normative ones. Among these activities, we find those dealing with running events in a Structured Business Process (SBP) context, which are the Detect, the Predict and the Recommend activities. These three activities are nominated as an operational support system that aims at detecting deviations, predicting events and recommending actions. In this regard, operational support systems perform well on SBP while, it stills a challenging task for an Unstructured Business Process (UBP). This puts forward the difficulty of predicting events and recommending actions for UBP, because of its complex structure. In this context, simplification and structuring operations must be applied. Therefore, the intervention of other process mining activities is required for business process simplification and structuring. To this end, we present an operational support approach dealing with UBP, using the refined process mining framework activities.

Alignment patterns for process-oriented appraisals and rewards: using HRM for BPM capability building

PurposeWhile the business process management (BPM) literature highlights the significance of aligning employee appraisals and rewards practices with business processes, little is known about the realization. The purpose of this paper is to concretize the impact of process-oriented appraisals and rewards on business process performance and to provide empirical evidence on how organizations actually align their appraisals and rewards practices with BPM.Design/methodology/approachA mixed-method approach has been employed by combining survey results with case studies to offer first-hand evidence. Survey data have been used to quantify the real impact of process-oriented appraisals and rewards. Next, case studies with 10 organizations have allowed us to gain deeper insight into organizational practices for making appraisals and rewards more process-oriented.FindingsThe survey proves that process-oriented employee appraisals and rewards positively affect performance if different employee levels are involved. The case studies reveal similarities and differences in alignment efforts across organizations, based on pattern-matching and a multidimensional analysis, resulting in four alignment patterns.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings extend knowledge about appraisals and rewards within a business process context by providing a quantification and pattern refinement, which specifically advance a BPM-facilitating culture.Practical implicationsManagers and executives benefit from the recommendations for a gradual BPM adoption to improve the success of their business processes and their people-related practices.Originality/valueThe authors offer one of the first in-depth, cross-disciplinary studies that intend to bridge between the disciplines of BPM and human resource management (HRM).

ARES: Automated Risk Estimation in Smart Sensor Environments.

Industry 4.0 adoption demands integrability, interoperability, composability, and security. Currently, integrability, interoperability and composability are addressed by next-generation approaches for enterprise systems integration such as model-based standards, ontology, business process model life cycle management and the context of business processes. Security is addressed by conducting risk management as a first step. Nevertheless, security risks are very much influenced by the assets that the business processes are supported. To this end, this paper proposes an approach for automated risk estimation in smart sensor environments, called ARES, which integrates with the business process model life cycle management. To do so, ARES utilizes standards for platform, vulnerability, weakness, and attack pattern enumeration in conjunction with a well-known vulnerability scoring system. The applicability of ARES is demonstrated with an application example that concerns a typical case of a microSCADA controller and a prototype tool called Business Process Cataloging and Classification System. Moreover, a computer-aided procedure for mapping attack patterns-to-platforms is proposed, and evaluation results are discussed revealing few limitations.

A Multi-criteria Evaluation Approach for Selecting a Sensitive Business Process Modeling Language for Knowledge Management

In an organizational context, the modeling and representation of sensitive business processes (SBPs) have become an effective way of managing and developing organization’s knowledge that needs to be capitalized. These processes are characterized by a high complexity and dynamism in their execution, high number of critical activities with intensive acquisition, sharing, storage and (re)use of very specific crucial knowledge, large diversity of heterogeneous knowledge and information sources, high number of knowledge conversion actions and high degree of collaboration among experts. Thus, the specification of a precise conceptualization for SBPs, and the selection of an appropriate SBP modeling language that adequately characterizes and integrates all their relevant dimensions are of prime importance. We aim at improving the localization and identification of the crucial knowledge that are mobilized by and created by these processes. This paper proposes a multi-criteria-based approach for evaluating and comparing currently widely used modeling languages (process oriented and knowledge oriented) for the representation of SBPs, taking into account their specific modeling requirements. We consider guiding and justifying the choice of the most suitable SBP modeling language for knowledge identification purposes. The different modeling languages are originally assessed according to the ontological completeness of SBP modeling aspects (i.e., the coverage of the functional, organizational, behavioral, informational, intentional and knowledge dimensions) based on the BPM4KI meta-model (as an SBP specification based on core ontologies). Secondly, they are evaluated according to several key requirement indicators (e.g., understandability, expressibility, complexity, level of adoption, tools availability and extendibility). Results show that none of the studied languages, individually, satisfies all the SBP modeling requirements. In this study, we choose the better one positioned nowadays, BPMN 2.0, as the best suited standard for SBP representation. Moreover, we develop a valid extension of BPMN 2.0 «BPMN4SBP» for integrating and implementing all relevant SBP modeling dimensions (the six BPM4KI dimensions), exploring the dynamic, interaction and knowledge aspects. The extension is then used to illustrate the representation of SBPs in a real case study in the healthcare domain.

What Is The Impact Of Case Management On Medical Cost Reduction In Healthcare Companies?

For healthcare insurance companies, managing and reducing medical costs is important to remain viable and/or meet investors and stakeholder expectations. The accountability to minimize costs and remain competitive becomes a responsibility for managers who work in these companies. Therefore, managers must continually look for methods to identify and implement opportunities that improve case management business processes. In this research study, the focus is on the question ‘what is the impact of case management on medical cost reduction in healthcare companies? This is asked within the context of business processes and leverages the four principles of Taylor’s scientific management theory. By investigating the relationship between case management processes in healthcare insurance companies and medical costs, the integrated synthesis uncovers that although evidence exists that case management does reduce medical costs, there is insufficient research on how to improve case management processes. There is an opportunity to provide recommendations on approaches and techniques to improving case management processes to reduce medical costs. Improving case management processes should include quantitative analysis. The proposition is that as case management processes improve and become more efficient, and when targeted against the right population, medical costs for healthcare insurance companies are reduced thereby improving the financial position of healthcare insurance companies. Therefore, managers who understand and know how to improve case management processes in healthcare insurance companies contribute more towards the financial position than companies who do not have the right management.

An end-to-end framework for context-aware business process outsourcing to the cloud

Highly motivated by the advantages of cloud computing, enterprises are considering outsourcing their business processes to the cloud to reduce their cost, increase their flexibility, and enhance their performance. The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive end-to-end framework for business process outsourcing to the cloud, that considers the dynamic business process context. The framework comprises different methods able to efficiently take into account accurate and up-to-date business process context to identify the best process fragment to outsource and the most suitable cloud service to adopt. The optimality of the identified solutions is insured by NSGA II (Elitist Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm) for which we proposed a set of context-based objective functions. In addition, the framework considers the business process context prior and post the outsourcing decision in order to change a decision to account for context changes. The performance of the framework is experimentally illustrated.

A framework for context-aware heterogeneous group decision making in business processes

In Business Process Management great attention is given to Computational Intelligence for supporting process life-cycle. Several approaches have been defined to support human decision making. The main drawback is that there are no solid criteria for determining optimal decisions since context, matter of discussion, and involved actors may differ at each execution. This work focuses on the definition of a framework to support and trace human decision making activities, in business processes, when heterogeneous decision-makers have to find a consensus to select most promising alternative to follow. The framework relies on Fuzzy Consensus Model and implements Reinforcement Learning algorithm to learn weight of the decision-makers through the analysis of past process executions considering context and performances of business processes. Context awareness relies on semantic web technologies enabling ontological reasoning to evaluate context similarity used to assign the right weight to the involved decision-makers also in the case when more general or more specific context occurs. The framework has been instantiated in the case study of Supply Chain Management. The analysis of the simulation results reveal that the proposed weight learning algorithm and the considered initial weight association strategies (Starting Weight and Training Executions), even if the cold start, give to decision-makers the chance to fill the gap with respect to more experienced decision makers.

Can open-source projects (re-)shape the SDN/NFV-driven telecommunication market?

Abstract Telecom network operators face rapidly changing business needs. Due to their dependence on long product cycles they lack the ability to quickly respond to changing user demands. To spur innovation and stay competitive, network operators are investigating technological solutions with a proven track record in other application domains such as open source software projects. Open source software enables parties to learn, use, or contribute to technology from which they were previously excluded. OSS has reshaped many application areas including the landscape of operating systems and consumer software. The paradigm shift in telecommunication systems towards Software-Defined Networking introduces possibilities to benefit from open source projects. Implementing the control part of networks in software enables speedier adaption and innovation, and less dependencies on legacy protocols or algorithms hard-coded in the control part of network devices. The recently proposed concept of Network Function Virtualization pushes the softwarization of telecommunication functionalities even further down to the data plane. Within the NFV paradigm, functionality which was previously reserved for dedicated hardware implementations can now be implemented in software and deployed on generic Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) hardware. This paper provides an overview of existing open source initiatives for SDN/NFV-based network architectures, involving infrastructure to orchestration-related functionality. It situates them in a business process context and identifies the pros and cons for the market in general, as well as for individual actors.

Variability patterns for business processes in BPMN

Many entities, both in academia and the business sector, urge an efficient improvement of business processes. However, when it comes to addressing this point, each slight disparity in the business rules and/or objectives translates into a separate model, which is neither practical nor acceptable as it burdens the host process-aware information system with repetitive and almost verbatim instances. To solve this issue, we propose considering variability. Variability will serve as a business process improvement technique to efficiently design and run a variable business process throughout different business situations that are similar to one another is some ways yet differ in others. First, we define variability within the context of business processes. Second, we present a set of variability patterns and explain how they are used. We validate our approach via the business process improvement patterns known and used by the community. The variability design patterns are a series of business process improvement patterns for building business process with variability and efficiently acting on the improved process performance metrics.

Exploring location-dependency in process modeling

Purpose – Context-awareness has emerged as an important principle in the design of flexible business processes. The goal of the research is to develop an approach to extend context-aware business process modeling toward location-awareness. The purpose of this paper is to identify and conceptualize location-dependencies in process modeling. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a pattern-based approach to identify location-dependency in process models. The authors design specifications for these patterns. The authors present illustrative examples and evaluate the identified patterns through a literature review of published process cases. Findings – This paper introduces location-awareness as a new perspective to extend context-awareness in BPM research, by introducing relevant location concepts such as location-awareness and location-dependencies. The authors identify five basic location-dependent control-flow patterns that can be captured in process models. And the authors identify location-dependencies in several existing case studies of business processes. Research limitations/implications – The authors focus exclusively on the control-flow perspective of process models. Further work needs to extend the research to address location-dependencies in process data or resources. Further empirical work is needed to explore determinants and consequences of the modeling of location-dependencies. Originality/value – As existing literature mostly focusses on the broad context of business process, location in process modeling still is treated as “second class citizen” in theory and in practice. This paper discusses the vital role of location-dependencies within business processes. The proposed five basic location-dependent control-flow patterns are novel and useful to explain location-dependency in business process models. They provide a conceptual basis for further exploration of location-awareness in the management of business processes.

Model-driven specification and enforcement of RBAC break-glass policies for process-aware information systems

ContextIn many organizational environments critical tasks exist which – in exceptional cases such as an emergency – must be performed by a subject although he/she is usually not authorized to perform these tasks. Break-glass policies have been introduced as a sophisticated exception handling mechanism to resolve such situations. They enable certain subjects to break or override the standard access control policies of an information system in a controlled manner. ObjectiveIn the context of business process modeling a number of approaches exist that allow for the formal specification and modeling of process-related access control concepts. However, corresponding support for break-glass policies is still missing. In this paper, we aim at specifying a break-glass extension for process-related role-based access control (RBAC) models. MethodWe use model-driven development (MDD) techniques to provide an integrated, tool-supported approach for the definition and enforcement of break-glass policies in process-aware information systems. In particular, we provide modeling support on the computation independent model (CIM) layer as well as on the platform independent model (PIM) and platform specific model (PSM) layers. ResultsOur approach is generic in the sense that it can be used to extend process-aware information systems or process modeling languages with support for process-related RBAC and corresponding break-glass policies. Based on the formal CIM layer metamodel, we present a UML extension on the PIM layer that allows for the integrated modeling of processes and process-related break-glass policies via extended UML Activity diagrams. We evaluated our approach in a case study on real-world processes. Moreover, we implemented our approach at the PSM layer as an extension to the BusinessActivity library and runtime engine. ConclusionOur integrated modeling approach for process-related break-glass policies allows for specifying break-glass rules in process-aware information systems.

Identity business processes

To facilitate information-system security, e.g., access control or audit, the entities involved play a key role. This makes identity management an important task. The success of service-oriented architectures (SOA) has lead to the development of federated identity management (FIM), to deal with the dynamic nature of SOA and to achieve economies of scale. Business processes in SOA are a composition of services provided by IT systems and manual actions performed by humans. Such compositions highly depend on the identity of participants. The identity in turn determines aspects such as preferred services or assignment of tasks. We analyse how to use FIM technologies to facilitate such identity-based compositions and identify the problems arising from this combination (business processes and FIM). Based on standards for business-process management, access control, and FIM, by carefully considerating design alternatives, we propose a system architecture for the execution of identity-based business processes. The system implements FIM concepts in an application-specific way, based on declarative configuration and taking the run-time context of business processes into account. Finally, we describe our implementation of the architecture based on the ZXID open-source library and its evaluation using a case study.

Business process artefact adaptability approach based on artificial immune systems

Changes in business conditions have forced enterprises to continuously be dynamic and flexible. Recent research has focused on developing adaptive business process management systems. However, those approaches do not take in consideration the business process context execution. On the other hand, modularity concern is a common strategy to a lower application complexity: it results in modules that are easy to maintain, to adapt, and to replace. In this work, each activity of a business process is encapsulated in an entity named artefact. These artefacts have an interface, a function and manual instruction described with very expressive formal languages that manage high level concepts. This study aims to apply artificial immune systems AIS to business process applications making their business process artefacts capable to be adaptive to changes that their environments are faced. We explore how in some ways, stimulus or change in business process execution environment can be considered as an antigen and the business process fragment artefact considered as antibody react to this stimulus.

Context-aware goal-oriented business process aspect modelling

In this research, we present a new general purpose methodology for aspectised modelling of the context of business processes within the different business domains and also for modelling business processes as goal-oriented finite state machines. Being dependent on context-awareness and goal-orientation, our method deduces recommendations for improving the business process flow. We envisioned how context may be conceptualised, how contextual elements may be distributed across business operational levels according to the goals of the business process, and how business process flow recommendations based on the aspectised contextual facts may materialise. We made our vision concrete by implementing a prototypical framework and we tested our framework within the airlines and telecom business domains. The experimental results showed significant improvement in the financial costs and execution time. The results proved the importance of integrating context-awareness, context-modelling and goal-orientation in the field of business process modelling as well as configuration and decision making.

Infusing agility in business processes through an event-centric approach

For business processes we consider agility to be the capability to modify and adjust them in the face of unexpected contingencies even during execution phase. Traditional process-centric approaches dictate action sequence definition within the context of a specific business process designed to cover organisations requirements at some former point in time. To address the phenomenon of business processes that fail to match newly evolved organisational needs we propose an event-centric approach identifying meaningful events that drive action execution. We consider actions as autonomous units being aware of only the events initiating them as well as the events they trigger. In that sense, the notion of business process sequence is eliminated; the needed functionality is modelled in a flexible manner in terms of autonomous actions, events and event combinations, promoting the dynamic formation of process instances at execution time. Our approach materialises through a set of methods, named actors-actions-events (AAE), which can be followed as a guide towards identifying the events and actions representing enterprise functionality. Its practical applicability is demonstrated through a simplified example in a medical setting.

Process-centered knowledge model and enterprise ontology for the development of knowledge management system

Among many enterprise assets, knowledge is treated as a critical driving force for attaining enterprise performance goals. This is because knowledge facilitates the better business decision makings in a timely fashion. However, since knowledge is created and utilized during the execution of business processes, if knowledge is separated from the business process context, it does not lead to the ability to take the right action for target performance.This paper proposes the framework for process-centered knowledge model and enterprise ontology for the context-rich and networked knowledge storage and retrieval required during task execution. The enterprise knowledge object for a process-centered knowledge model is classified into two types: process knowledge and task support knowledge. In the proposed enterprise ontology, which represents major enterprise concepts, and the relationships between them, all domain concepts are related to the “process” concept, both directly and indirectly. As a result, networked and sophisticated knowledge, rather than single-level knowledge, is provided to the participant of unit activity.In order to show the applicability of the proposed framework, a process-centered KMS (knowledge management system) was also developed, which is classified into 3 parts: (1) project management sub-system based on process knowledge. (2) Knowledge management sub-system for maintaining task support knowledge. (3) Infrastructure sub-system which supports the above two sub-systems.

A business process context for Knowledge Management

Knowledge and management of it emphasize and expect interactions between aspects of business processes including workflow execution, information processing, decision making and motivational structure. As such production and consumption of knowledge occur within these aspects of business processes. Therefore, a business process context provides the justification and rationale for organizing Knowledge Management efforts that address knowledge storage and retrieval, knowledge sharing and knowledge synthesis. Exemplar projects are used to illustrate potential approaches and associated research challenges to addressing Knowledge Management efforts within a business process context.

Developing a Theory to Explain the Insights Gained Concerning Information Systems and Business Process Behaviour: The ASSESS-IT Project

Business Process (BP) literature promotes the value of business processes as essential gearwheels that help organisations to reach their goals. Similarly, many process design approaches claim that information technology is a major enabler of business process, a view also shared by the Information Systems (IS) community. Despite this, BP and IS approaches do not provide clear guidance on how to coordinate the design of BP and IS. Nor is any indication of which modelling techniques could be used to detect and design IT opportunities within a business process context given. The ASSESS-IT project examined this domain and proposed the use of simulation techniques to achieve BP and IT integration. The outcome of this project gave indication that depicting the dynamic behaviour of IS could be very helpful for BP modellers to predict the impact that the insertion of IS may have on organisational processes. This paper proposes a simulation framework to depict IS behaviour within a BP simulation model, namely BPS/ISS, and tests it using the case study that was part of the ASSESS-IT project.

A simulation-based decision support system for business process planning

Over the last few years, there has been wide discussion in the field of economics research with regard to the process-oriented approach. Extensive restructuring took place in practice. To improve business processes, a generally applicable, object-oriented, simulation-based decision support system abbreviated as GEPSIS has been developed. It is used to model business processes and to evaluate different process alternatives quantitatively. The aim is to determine the optimal process. Within a business process context, tasks, work flows and decisions are influenced by persons whose behavior is not deterministic. Such a behavior cannot be described adequately taking crisp approaches. For this reason, consideration of uncertainty and vagueness is of special importance. Both stochastic and linguistic types of uncertainty are considered. The vagueness of verbal formulations is modeled using linguistic variables. Several specific procedures are developed for process control. They result from specific priority rules for the object classes. Furthermore, a knowledge-based procedure comprising approximate inference is developed. In this way, rules for the sequencing of workflow objects can be modeled approximating reality. The suitability of GEPSIS and the effects of the application of different procedures to process control are demonstrated. This is achieved by considering a mail order book and record store and analyzing its actual business – e.g. the order process. The example covers some typical flow structures which can be found in many order processing situations.