The Association for Information Systems has a system of special interest groups that focus on different research areas within the Information Systems domain. One of these groups focuses on BPM and is called sig|pam (Special Interest Group for Process Automation and Management). After a long hiatus the group has been revived at the recent AMCIS conference, where Amit Deokar, Jay Nunamaker and I chaired a minitrack on BPM.

sig|pam is maintained by the illuminati of academic BPM research, so point your browsers to www.sigpam.org and find out what is going on in the BPM research scene…

I am no stranger to nordic countries. I taught in Estonia for a while and visited Finland a couple of times. And if Germans are known for their efficient ways, well, we can learn a thing or two from the people up north. In the course of my research on standards I came across the dissertation of Vladislav V. Fomin, who wrote on the Process of Standard Making using two case studies from the mobile phone industry. His dissertation is available from his alma mater, the University of Jyväskylä (more properly: Jyväskylän yliopiston kirjasto/Julkaisuyksikkö…). After some prodding and testing I found the link to order the book here. Filled out the form - off we go. But wait: No payment information was requested?!

A couple of days went by and I pretty much forgot the whole thing until an envelope arrived in my mailbox with the requested book inside, and a polite invoice for 10 Euros and 33 cents - the book cost 2 Euros, shipping 8 Euros and 33 cents. “Please instruct your bank to forward payment orders to …” Somewhat different from the usual Amazon.com experience.

Apparently, the default expectation of our Finnish friends is that people will pay, if you provide good service to them, as opposed to the typical US default, which is pay first, we’ll provide service later (maybe). This reminds me of a paper I read a while ago Read the rest of this entry »

I am attending the BPM Think Tank in Burlingame this week, and there are many insightful presentations around emerging standards in the BPM space, such as BPDM, BPMM, BMM, BPMN 2.0 and OSRM. But one thing makes me wonder - with every revision, every iteration, the standard specifications grow in size. The new BPMM specification has a whopping 505 pages in draft version. A participant asked what the effect would be if the BPMN 2.0 specification, which combines BPMN and BPDM, would be a 1,000 page document. Nobody knows… I had a look at some older and newer specifications, and this is what I came up with:

There are some interesting observations to make:

• Standard specifications seem to double between versions. The only exception is UML, which actually shrank 300 pages between versions 1.3 and 2.0
• Some organizations produce shorter specifications than others. For example, IETF specifications seem to be rather concise, compared to OMG or OASIS specifications.

Now, counting pages is not a very exact metric to gauge the complexity of a specification, but it is safe to assume that a 300 page specification is significantly more complex than a 60 page specification. I brought this up at the Think Tank, and it was suggested that specs grow because the working groups add clarifications and explanations. But it is also possible that as the standard specs grow, the effort to implement them and to prove conformance with all aspects of a specification increases significantly. If that is the case, do bigger standards keep the industry from advancing?

My research group and groups at seven other universities form the Innovation & Education Network in BPM, sponsored by IDS Scheer. This group was launched in mid-June, and our local Cablevision channel stopped by and conducted a short interview, which I promptly YouTubed. What’s next? The Daily Show?

A little side comment about the do’s and don’ts of process discovery last month stirred up some interest, so Jan Recker and I got together and wrote a little piece.

Organizations have an unprecedented number of opportunities available to change and improve their processes. Advances in organizational research, mature supporting information systems, and complementary service offerings allow them to create compliant processes, improve their performance, simulate, automate, and monitor them. But one key challenge remains: You need to find your processes first.

During our BPM Day seminar on June 27th, part of the discussion focused on strategies for the identification of processes. Keith Swenson picked this up in a blog post here. We propose that process modelers seek out a rainy day scenario first, in order to discover as many process variants as possible early during their process modeling efforts. You can read our advice here:

• zur Muehlen, M.; Recker, J.: Asking the Wrong Questions: Process Discovery on a Rainy Day. BPM.com, July 3rd, 2007. Available online at http://www.bpm.com/ [free registration required]

My friends at Canon USA interviewed me a while ago for their strategic planning group. They cut the footage and mixed it with some other interviews for a large management meeting and were kind enough to send me a DVD of the whole thing - thank you! The questions were wide open - how will work evolve over the next 25-50 years etc., so here is my attempt at futurecasting….

In the context of process management, the aspect of process execution risk has rarely been considered; in the instances where it has been studied it was analyzed mostly from a project management perspective. But risk is an inherent property of every business process and techniques are needed to identify, represent and analyze business process risks. The absence of such techniques is a concern because both operational risk mitigation and legal compliance depend on the sufficient identification of corporate risk. We have recently started to address the topic of risk management in the context of business process management. At the project level we analyze which project risks are specific to business process management projects and what mitigation techniques are available to increase the probability of success for a given process management project. At the process level we develop a taxonomy of process-related risks and study how this taxonomy can be applied in the analysis and documentation of business processes. Our goal is to extend contemporary process modeling methods to document process-related risks and their relationships with goals, other risks and processes. The first results of this work were published at the BPD Workshop in September and the ACIS Conference in December 2005.

• zur Muehlen, Michael; Ho, Danny Ting-Yi: Risk Management in the BPM Lifecycle. In: Bussler, Christoph; Haller, Armin (Eds.): Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2005 International Workshops, BPI, BPD, ENEI, BPRM, WSCOBPM, BPS, Nancy, France, September 5, 2005. Revised Selected Papers, Springer LNCS 3812, Berlin 2006, pp. 454-466.
• zur Muehlen, Michael; Rosemann, Michael: Integrating Risks in Business Process Models. Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian Conference on Information Systems. Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia (winner of best paper award)
• Neiger, Dina; Churilov, Leonid; zur Muehlen, Michael; Rosemann, Michael: Integrating Risks in Business Process Models with Value Focused Process Engineering. In: Proceedings of the 2006 European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2006), Goteborg, Sweden, June 12-14, 2006.

Business process modeling supports a variety of design and management approaches that are of significant interest for enterprises. These approaches include business process management, risk management, and enterprise architecture design. The trend to centralized and integrated business modeling leads to projects with a high number of models, modelers, users, and modeling purposes. We call this phenomenon is called modeling in the large.

Queensland University of Technology, Stevens Institute of Technology, Monash University, University of Queensland and SAP Research have launched a research project to explore the major issues within these projects and to develop improved modeling techniques and project management approaches for large-scale modeling initiatives. The outcomes of this project will streamline the design, integration, maintenance and communication of models with a focus on Enterprise Systems.

A series of initial focus group meetings are currently taking place with representatives of Fortune 100 Enterprises as well as members of the participating research organizations. Hot topics are: Showing the business value of modeling, finding the right level of process abstraction, and process standardization in multinational organizations.

• Raduescu, Corina, Tan, Hui-Min, Jayaganesh, Malini, Bandara, Wasana, zur Muehlen, Michael, Lippe, Sonia: A Framework of Issues in Large Process Modeling Projects. In: Proceedings of the 2006 European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2006), Goteborg, Sweden, June 12-14, 2006.

Web Services in their simplest incarnation support only stateless communication between a requester and a provider. Many services are potentially long running, and contingencies for alternative service invocation or service failure have to be provided. For this reason, a number of Web Services Choreography standards are currently being developed, for instance BPEL or WS-C. We take a look at the current state of the standards field, and compare the history and outcome of the different standardization efforts. This is an exploratory case study, motivated by two observations. First, that the current interest in web services is directing attention to issues that have a longer history in the workflow community. Second, that the debate over web services choreography standards appears to be deeply influenced by architectural style, understood by relatively few. We started with one question - whether the technical debate has merit and should be better understood by a wider community. We also ask whether the battle is only about the technology. We found answers to both questions…

• zur Muehlen, Michael; Nickerson, Jeffrey V.; Swenson, Keith D.: Developing Web Services Choreography Standards - The Case of REST vs. SOAP. Decision Support Systems 40 (2005) 1, pp. 9-29.

The Workflow Patterns project by Arthur ter Hofstede, Marlon Dumas, and Wil van der Aalst analyzes the expressiveness of workflow languages. By using a catalog of predefined modeling patterns they studied a number of commercial and research workflow modeling languages. In addition to control flow patterns, Nick Russell, David Edmond, Arthur ter Hofstede and Wil van der Aalst have studied the use of data patterns for the modeling of the data aspect of process automation systems. The project website contains much background information as well as documentation of the individual patterns and analyses of current workflow systems and standards - highly recommended. > BABEL Homepage