BPM Tutorial

Business Process Automation – Trends and Issues

The following slides have been presented at a workshop on Business Process Automation, held at the 2004 Americas Conference on Information Systems in New York, NY, on August 5th, 2004.

1. Introduction
2. Modeling Business Processes
3. Identifying workflow-suitable Processes
4. Task Assignment and Integration Issues
5. BPM, Web Services Choreography, and Standardization
6. Process Monitoring and Controlling
7. Teaching and Research Issues
8. Links

Please cite these slides as:

zur Muehlen, Michael: Business Process Automation – Trends and Issues. Workshop at the 2004 Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, NY, August 5th 2004.

Links

Links to get started:

• www.e-workflow.org – Case Studies
• www.processmining.org – Tools & Papers
• dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Workflow/ – Directory of workflow web sites

Standards

• www.wfmc.org – Glossary, XPDL, Wf-XML
• www.bpmn.org – BPMN
• www.oasis-open.org – ASAP, BPEL, BPSS
• www.w3c.org – WS-CDL working group
• www.omg.org – Workflow Facility
• www.rosettanet.org – Partner Interface Processes

Open Source Projects

• jawe.objectweb.org – XPDL editor
• enhydra.objectweb.org
• www.jbpm.org
• www.openbusinessengine.org
• bonita.objectweb.org
• xflow.sourceforge.net
• wfmopen.sourceforge.net

References

Good Introductory Articles

• van der Aalst, W. M. P.; ter Hofstede, A. H. M.; Kiepuszewski, B.; Barros, A. P.: Workflow Patterns. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 14 (2003) 3, pp. 5-51.
• van der Aalst, W. M. P.: The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management. The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers, 8 (1998) 1, pp. 21-66.
• Basu, A.; Kumar, A.: Research Commentary: Workflow Management Issues in e-Business. Information Systems Research, 13 (2002) 1, pp. 1-14.
• Kumar, A.; Zhao, J. L.: Workflow support for electronic commerce applications. Decision Support Systems, 32 (2002) 3, pp. 265-278.
• Stohr, E. A.; Zhao, J. L.: Workflow Automation: Overview and Research Issues. Information Systems Frontiers, 3 (2001) 3, pp. 281-296.
• zur Muehlen, M.: Evaluation of Workflow Management Systems Using Meta Models. In: 32nd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS 1999). Ed.: Ralph Sprague, Jr., Wailea, HI, 1999.

History

• Zisman, M.: Representation, Specification, and Automation of Office Procedures. PhD Thesis, Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (PA) 1977.
• Ellis, C. A.; Nutt, G. J.: Office Information Systems and Computer Science. ACM Computing Surveys, 12 (1980) 1, pp. 27-60.
• Suchman, L. A.: Plans and Situated Actions. The problem of human machine communication. Cambridge (MA) 1987.
• Medina-Mora, R.; Winograd, T.; Flores, R.; Flores, F.: The Action Workflow Approach to Workflow Management Technology. In: Proceedings of the 1992 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘92). New York (NY), 1992, pp. 281-288.
• Abbott, K. R.; Sarin, S. K.: Experiences with Workflow Management: Issues for the Next Generation. In: Proceedings of the conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Chapel Hill, 1994, pp. 113-120.
• Georgakopolous, D.; Hornick, M.; Sheth, A.: An Overview of Workflow Management: From Process Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrastructure. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 3 (1995) 2, pp. 119- 153.

Books

• van der Aalst, W. M. P.; van Hee, K.: Workflow Management. Models, Methods, and Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2002.
• Jablonski, S.; Bussler, C.: Workflow Management. Modeling Concepts, Architecture and Implementation. Thomson, London et al. 1996. (out of print, but good)
• Leymann, F.; Roller, D.: Production Workflow: Concepts and Techniques. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (NJ) 2000.
• Reijers, Hajo A.: Design and Control of Workflow Processes: Business Process Management for the Service Industry (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2617), Springer, Berlin 2003.
• zur Muehlen, M.: Workflow-based Process Controlling. Foundation, Design, and Implementation of Workflow-driven Process Information Systems. Logos, Berlin 2004. (yeah, I know. shameless marketing)
• Proceedings of the International Conference on BPM 2003-2007 (Springer LNCS)
• Fischer, L. (Ed.): Excellence in Practice Series (several volumes), Future Strategies, Lighthouse Point (FL).
• Fischer, L. (Ed.): Workflow Handbook (editions 2000-2007). Future Strategies, Lighthouse Point (FL).