BPM Conference Tutorials - Beyond Rigidity: Lifecycle Management for Dynamic Processes

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27 September 2007, 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Download Outline of Tutorial (PDF, 38Kb)

Abstract

The economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Recently, a new generation of process-aware information systems (PAIS) has emerged to provide this flexibility and to support dynamic processes. Similar to classical information systems development lifecycles, studies on life cycle support for dynamic business processes are often sweeping the issues pertaining to post deployment change management, under the banner of maintenance. However, the pervasiveness of dynamic changes in business processes warrants targeted attention.

This tutorial presents a review of the basic challenges and techniques that exist for life cycle management of dynamic processes. Our approach is to present ideal support for the needs of the various life cycle phases and then to deliberate on various developments from academia and industry in terms of their closeness to these needs, thus identifying open questions where relevant. A case study is presented which forms a motivational backbone for the whole tutorial. A detailed discussion of the process lifecycle structured around the three main phases of design, execution, and monitoring & analysis and proof-of-concept demonstrations are provided.

Outline

The tutorial is split into 3 parts covering the three p h ases of the process lifecycle:

Part I: Definitional Phase (by Shazia Sadiq)

We discuss business process definition both from a management strategy perspective and from a means to realize executable processes. This covers:

• a survey on approaches to business process modelling (including best practice templates, reference models, formal languages, patterns and standards)
• a presentation of the specific challenges for modelling the dynamic process as well as the various solutions and approaches (e.g., case handling, emergent workflow, exception handling, rule driven)

Part II: Execution Phase (by Barbara Weber)

We discuss challenges and solutions for flexible process exe­cution and particularly motivate the importance of run-time process adaptability. This covers:

• a survey on state-of-the-art technology enabling ad-hoc changes, late modelling and late binding.
• a discussion of change patterns and change features in PAIS as well as a pattern-based comparison of state-of-the-art technology for dynamic processes

Part III: Monitoring & Analysis Phase (by Manfred Reichert)

We discuss challenges and solutions related to the monitoring and analysis of process execution data. This covers:

• process performance analysis and organizational learning based on process logs (i.e., execution as well as change logs)
• discovering process improvements by mining these process logs
• implementing process changes through process schema evolution techniques

The final discussion at the end of the tutorial comprises a summary on open questions.

Barbara Weber
University of Innsbruck, Austria
Barbara.Weber@uibk.ac.at

Shazia Sadiq
The University of Queensland, Australia
shazia@itee.uq.edu.au

Manfred Reichert
University of Twente, Netherlands
m.u.reichert@utwente.nl