Collaborative Business Process Management Research Articles

The Importance of Testing in the Early Stages of Smart Contract Development Life Cycle

The use of smart contract augurs a world without intermediaries because the code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. In software engineering, this collaboration is usually represented by using business process models and smart contracts can be used to implement business collaborations in general and inter-organizational business processes. The validation of this contract and the assurance of its quality are critical for its right application. Early testing in smart contract definition is the fact of this paper. The paper discusses the possibility to use transformation protocols to obtain derived artefacts like test case definitions and smart contract code scaffolds. Generation of derived artefacts significantly reduces the number of defects before deploying the smart contract code in the blockchain network. Transformations protocols are created using model-based software development and modelling techniques. This approach allows to simplify and improve the management and execution of collaborative business processes. This would allow, in addition, the application of systematic mechanisms to evaluate and validate the smart contract and, particularly, the application of early testing techniques which would help to reduce the number of defects and, ultimately, the cost of the final review.

Using Blockchain to Improve Collaborative Business Process Management: Systematic Literature Review

BlockChain Technology (BCT) has appeared with strength and promises an authentic revolution on business, management, and organizational strategies related to utilization of advanced software systems. In fact, BCT promotes a decentralized architecture to process management and the collaborative work between entities when these ones are working together in a business process. This paper aims to know what proposals exist to improve any stage of business process management using BCT because this technology could provide benefits in this management. For this purpose, this paper presents a systematic literature review in area of Collaborative Business Processes (CBP) in BCT domain to identify opportunities and gaps for further research. This paper concludes there is a rapid and growing interest of public bodies, scientific community and software industries to know opportunities that BCT offers to improve CBP management in a decentralized manner. However, although the topic is in early stages, there are very promising lines of research and relevant open issues, but there also is lack of scientific rigor in validation process into the different studies.

CBG-Framework: A bottom-up model-based approach for Collaborative Business Process Management

Nowadays most existing products and services are the result of the collaboration of a large number of companies that form a value chain known as Supply Chain (SC). Then individual Business Process Management (BPM) requires a holistic vision that incorporates an inter organizational view that supports SC decision making. This study proposes a novel idea trying to address collaborative BP modelling problem with a new perspective, a bottom-up approach, reusing process models that each organization may have created with a different modelling language. Collaborative Business Generation (CBG) Framework, following Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm, includes a meta model, a method, a set of model transformations and a support tool to create collaborative BP models from individual ones, maintaining privacy and autonomy in decision making. This paper presents main CBG-Framework elements as well as a real world case study for early validation.

Collaborative Business Process Management Through a Platform Based on Cloud Computing

With the wide adoption of the Internet, organizations establish collaborative networks to execute Collaborative Business Processes (CBPs). Current approaches of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) to implement and execute CBPs have shortcomings: high costs and complexity of IT infrastructure to deploy the PAISs; poor support for organization autonomy, decentralized execution, global view of message exchange, and peer-to-peer interactions; and rigid platforms for generating and deploying PAISs on-demand according to the CBPs agreed in collaborative networks. To overcome these issues, this work proposes a cloud-based platform for the management of CBPs. The platform provides cloud services that enable the generation and deployment on-demand of the PAISs required to implement the agreed CBPs, as well as the execution on-demand of CBPs by fulfilling the abovementioned issues. The use of cloud computing also implies to deal with privacy, elasticity, and portability issues; the platform offers proper approaches to deal with them.

Resilience analysis of service-oriented collaboration process management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies, it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should, however, be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e., overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and runtime.

Dynamic capabilities in e-health innovation: Implications for policies

ObjectiveTo mitigate the effect of caregiver shortage, collaborative networks in Norwegian municipalities are exploring the possibilities provided by e-health and welfare technologies. However, extracting benefits from such technologies depends on many factors. MethodsIn this study, an extensive literature review is performed to compare e-health and other sectors in terms of the critical success factors in collaborative business process management. Using the dynamic capabilities view as a general theoretical lens, and a process orientation framework for operationalization, these factors are then conceptualized and validated in a cross-sectional study of cases in the Norwegian municipal e-health sector. ResultsThe study contributes to e-health research by identifying the key factors that influence performance. These factors are significantly driven by government policies and regulations. Our findings challenge the assumption that welfare technology networks can be built from the bottom up without government intervention. Regulatory interventions are needed, to obtain process performance metrics and foster viable, long-term business models for the participating institutions. ConclusionThe findings have an impact on research and practice, especially in local public management, for predicting and prescribing future development in this context. There are indications of significant gaps in government policies and regulations. Further research should examine whether and how these findings transcend the chosen context.

모바일 클라우드 환경에서 비즈니스 프로세스를 위한 XMDR-DAI를 이용한 소셜 기반의 협업 시스템

In this paper, we propose a social-based collaboration systems for business process management in the mobile cloud. This XMDR-DAI is to provide services for data sharing and exchange between local systems that operate independently in a cloud environment, take charge of a social-based collaborative business process management. Social-based collaborative business processes are handled in a collision among a structure such as unit conversion, meaning conflict, and the schema mapping data resulting from the inner query. The conflict was resolved by mapping process which takes in each XMDR-DAI.

Software Agents for Management Dynamic Inter-Organizational Collaborations

The globalization, modern markets, as well as new organizational management philosophies and advances in Information and Communications Technologies, encourage organizations to establish collaboration networks or inter-organizational collaborations. In this paper we propose a technology solution based on software agents which allows supporting the management of collaborative business processes in environments dynamic inter-organizational collaborations. First, we propose a software agent platform that integrates in agent specification's the notions of Belief-Desire-Intention agent architecture with functionalities of process-aware information systems. The platform enables organizations to negotiate collaborations agreements in electronic format to establish dynamic inter-organizational collaborations and define the collaborative processes to be executed. Second, we propose a methodology that includes methods based on Model-Driven Development, which enable the generation of executable process models and the code of process-oriented agents, derived from conceptual models of collaborative processes. This methodology and methods are implemented and automated by software agents that enable the generations of these implementation artifacts, at run-time of the platform. Therefore, the platform enables the automatic generation of the technology solution that requires each organization to execute the agreed collaborative processes, where the generated artifacts are built and initialized in the platform, allowing the implementation and execution of these processes. In this way, the proposed agent-based platform allows to establish collaboration among heterogeneous and autonomous organizations focusing in the process-oriented integration.

Collaborative business process management: status quo and quo vadis

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the status quo with regards to business process management (BPM) and collaboration and to show potential fields of future research in the area of collaborative BPM.Design/methodology/approachTo obtain results, authors employ the method of a systematic literature review using relevant existing guidelines. They not only search leading journals and conferences in the fields but also in ISI web of knowledge's web of science. Subsuming, 39 relevant articles are selected and analyzed with regards to concepts identified upfront.FindingsThe paper finds that collaborative BPM is a growing trend in information systems research, but that there still exist significant research gaps. Hence, it proposes a research agenda consisting out of five action fields pointing at potentially fruitful directions for future research.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, this paper provides an overview of the status quo in the field of collaborative BPM to young scholars. Second, it identifies five distinct research gaps that could be worth studying. However, this paper may be limited by the choice of dimensions and the selection of relevant articles.Practical implicationsThis paper informs practitioners about the status quo of research on collaborative BPM. Here, especially the analysis in the dimensions collaboration partner and BPM goals can help to evaluate the practitioner's strategy.Originality/valueThe results of this paper present the status quo of collaborative BPM literature. Hence, it also identifies research gaps and derives a research agenda.

Challenges and opportunities in collaborative business process management: Overview of recent advances and introduction to the special issue

Modern business process management expands to cover the partner organisations’ business processes across organisational boundaries, and thereby supports organisations to coordinate the flow of information among organisations and link their business processes. With collaborative business processes, organisations can create dynamic and flexible collaborations to synergically adapt to the changing conditions, and stay competitive in the global market. Due to its significant potential and value, collaborative business processes are now turning to be an important issue of contemporary business process management, and attracts lots of attention and efforts from both academic and industry sides. In this paper, we review the development of B2B collaboration and collaborative business processes, provide an overview of related issues in managing collaborative business processes, and discuss some emerging technologies and their relationships to collaborative business processes. Finally, we introduce the papers that are published in this special issue.