Tonia de Bruin at QUT Brisbane is tracking the pathways organizations are taking during the Business Process Improvement efforts. Do you start with technology first? Or do you instill a process culture in your organization right away? As part of her doctoral work, Tonia is conducting a survey of organizations that are engaged in (or have already completed) Business Process Management projects. It takes 10 minutes to fill out and the results will be made available to participants. You can find the survey here: http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/students/toniadebruin/survey/

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.