Call for Research and Industry Papers

BPM 2013 is the eleventh edition of the reference conference for researchers and practitioners in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). The conference covers all aspects of BPM, including theory, models, techniques, architectures, systems, and empirical studies, and engages the most renowned representatives of the BPM community worldwide in talks, tutorials, and scientific discussions.

Up to 3 new positions (1 Research Fellow and up to 2 PhD students) are available at the BPM Research Group within the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. The positions are under a new research project on “Facilitating Business Process Standardization and Reuse”.

Project background

One of the most pressing management challenges of today’s organisations lies in the reuse and standardisation of best practices across different sectors, products or units. This project aims to design and develop an innovative process model repository and appropriate governance structures to efficiently and effectively support the standardisation and reuse of best practices. The project is co-founded by Suncorp, one of Australia’s top 25 listed companies and Queensland’s largest listed corporation. Suncorp provides a range of banking and insurance products directly to customers through an extensive branch and agency network, call centre operations, on-line facilities, and through intermediaries and corporate partners. The collaboration with Suncorp will offer the successful applicants an opportunity to work with real-life business process models, and the possibility to conduct case studies to validate the outcomes of their research.

Research Fellow

The role of this research fellow is to work on algorithms and techniques to facilitate standardization of proven practices in large collections of business process models. Moreover, the fellow is expected to take a key role in the management of the research project. S(he) will assist in the supervision of research students where required, and participate in the development of the project by preparing and collating publications, reports and articles, as appropriate. Furthermore, s(he) will develop, and oversee the development of, prototypical software.

Position Title: Research Fellow

Closes: 14 February 2011

Organisational Area: Information Systems, Faculty of Science and Technology

Campus: 126 Margaret Street, Brisbane

Salary Range/Classification: $72 617 to $86 241 pa Research Fellow (Level B)

Superannuation: 17% employer contribution

Status: Fixed-term for up to 2 years

Start date: mid 2011

Position Contact and Title: Dr Marcello La Rosa

(07) 3138 9482

Open to: Australian and International Applicants.

PhD 1

The role of this PhD student is to work on algorithms to reuse best practices within large process model collections. Within this work, the PhD student will be required to conduct requirements analysis, formal algorithm specification, implementation and testing.

Position Title: PhD in Computer Science

Closes: 14 February 2011

Organisational Area: Information Systems, Faculty of Science and Technology

Campus: 126 Margaret Street, Brisbane

Scholarship: $27,222 pa (tax exempt) + tuition fee waiver

Status: Fixed-term 3 years

Start date: March 2011

Position Contact and Title: Dr Marcello La Rosa

(07) 3138 9482

Open to: Australian and International Applicants.

PhD 2

The role of this PhD student is to examine theoretically and empirically the use, appropriation, governance and impact of the process model repository to be built within this project, in contexts of process standardization and reuse. To that end, the PhD student will be required to examine managerial aspects of process modelling, the use of process modelling in actual organisational task settings, as well as important organisational decision-making structures.

Position Title: PhD in Information Systems

Closes: 14 February 2011

Organisational Area: Information Systems, Faculty of Science and Technology

Campus: 126 Margaret Street, Brisbane

Scholarship: $27,222 pa (tax exempt) + tuition fee waiver

Status: Fixed-term 3 years

Start date: March 2011

Position Contact and Title: A/Prof. Jan Recker

(07) 3138 9479

Open to: Australian and International Applicants.

8th International Conference on Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) becomes increasingly important as companies want to increase insight, efficiency and effectiveness of their operations. BPM 2010 is the eighth conference in a series that provides the most distinguished forum for researchers and practitioners in all aspects of BPM including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, systems, and empirical findings. It will be held from September 13-16, 2010, at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, just minutes from downtown Manhattan. The conference has a record of attracting innovative research of highest quality, from a mix of disciplines including Computer Science, Management Information Science, Services Computing, Services Science, and Technology Management. The acceptance rate at the BPM conference has traditionally been around 15%. In addition to showcasing leading research, the conference provides a venue for the discussion of BPM education, the demonstration of innovative systems with BPM functionalities, and an exchange among BPM practitioners.

Call for Research Papers (Deadline: 14 March 2010)

BPM 2010 continues with the broad-based themes of previous BPM conferences, and strives to strengthen and expand in several key directions. The conference especially encourages emerging research on new conceptual models for BPM understood broadly, models that attempt to unify core aspects of BPM, including process management, data management, business rules and requirements, and analytics, that until recently have been represented using rather disparate conceptual models. The conference also encourages the increasing interest in applying established and new techniques, such as model-driven architectures, Web services and Web architectures, SOA, and Cloud Computing , to the specific challenges of BPM. Finally, the conference seeks to attract papers that highlight the pervasive need for BPM capabilities across application areas outside of business management, including healthcare delivery, digital government, disaster management, and management of scientific and other academic endeavors, and that highlight how new techniques can solve the distinctive challenges arising in those diverse areas.

Call for Education and Curriculum Papers (Due: 14 March 2010)

The new Education and Curriculum track invites papers that examine effective education and training methods for developing the BPM professional. The intent is to share and develop relevant knowledge and to promote fresh ideas for the integration of the broad spectrum of BPM dimensions into training and education courses and/or programs. General questions include the current state of BPM education in universities and/or professional education organizations, what courses and content of those courses are effective at developing BPM professionals, what methods of education/training deployment help BPM professionals understand the holistic nature of end-to-end process-centric organizations, and what types of skills and abilities are needed for BPM deployments and sustainment.

Call for Demonstrations (Due: 17 May 2010)

The Demonstration track showcases innovative Business Process Management (BPM) tools and applications that may originate either from research initiatives or from industry. The Demonstration Track will provide an opportunity to present and discuss emerging technologies with researchers and practitioners in the BPM field. In addition, authors are invited to submit a paper describing their prototype for publication.

Call for Industry Contributions (Abstracts Due: 15 February 2010)

The BPM 2010 industry track will provide practitioners with the opportunity to present insight gained through BPM projects. We are particularly interested in case studies from the perspective of user organizations. We are particularly interested in contributions that address one the following themes:

Conference Committee:

General Chairs

Michael zur Muehlen, Stevens Institute of Technology
Henry Chang, IBM Research

Program Chairs

Industry Chair

Workshop Chair

Doctoral Consortium Chair

Demo Chair

3rd International Workshop on Governance Risk and Compliance – Applications in Information Systems (GRCIS’10)

7 June, 2010
Hammamet, Tunisia
In conjunction with CAiSE’10

BACKGROUND
The importance of governance and associated issues of compliance and risk management is well recognized in enterprise systems. This importance has dramatically increased over the last few years as a result of numerous events that led to some of the largest scandals in corporate history. The governance, risk and compliance market is estimated to be worth over $32 billion. Tool support for governance, risk and compliance related initiatives is provided by over 100 software vendors, however, while the tools have on average tripled in price since 2003, they are often insufficient to meet organizational needs. At the same time, there is an increasing complexity in the facilitation of compliant business processes, which stems from an increasing number of regulations, frequent and dynamic changes, as well as shared processes and services executing in highly decentralized environments.

In the age of outsourcing, dynamic business networks, and global commerce, it is inevitable that organizations will need to develop methods, tools and techniques to design, engineer, and assess processes and services that meet regulatory, standard and contractual obligations. Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) can be expected to play a significant part in several applications. This area is emerging as a critical and challenging area of research and innovation. It introduces, among others, the need for new or adapted modeling approaches for compliance requirements, extension of process and service modeling and execution frameworks for compliance and risk management, and detection of policy violations.

This workshop provides a forum for researchers from diverse backgrounds to contribute to this emerging area and make a consolidated contribution in the form of new and extended methods that address the challenges of governance, risk and compliance in information systems.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics covered by the workshop will include at least the following:

* Policy definition and enforcement
* Compliant service and process design
* Wordpress transfers
* Noncompliant process identification
* Risk management
* Visualization and simulation of risk in process models
* Governance processes
* Integration and effectuation of multiple regulatory standards
* Compliance, risk and tolerance metrics
* Organizational structures to support compliance
* Separation of duties/Separation of rights
* Decision tracing
* Data provenance and lineage
* Work tracking
* Violation detection
* Technologies for compliance assurance
* Applications, case studies and use cases

Submitted papers will be subjected to a double-blind review process and evaluated on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish the research contribution, and relation to previous research. Position and survey papers are also welcome. The proceedings will be published as online CEUR Workshop Proceedings. We are currently negotiating a Special Issue in a high quality international journal for selected best papers from the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: March 1, 2010
Notification of acceptance: March 29, 2010
Camera ready: April 15, 2010
Workshop: June 7, 2010

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Papers should be submitted in PDF format. As the review process is double-blind, papers must not include author details. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions must conform to Springer’s LNCS format and should not exceed 15 pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices. Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. It is expected that at least one author of each accepted paper will register for and attend the workshop. Papers should be submitted via the EasyChair submission system.

CO-CHAIRS
Dr Marta Indulska
UQ Business School
The University of Queensland
St Lucia QLD 4072
Brisbane, Australia

Dr Michael zur Muehlen
Howe School of Technology Management
Stevens Institute of Technology
Castle Point on Hudson
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

Dr Shazia Sadiq
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
The University of Queensland
St Lucia QLD 4072
Brisbane, Australia

CONTACT

AMCIS 2010 Call for Papers

Business Process Management and Innovation mini-track

Over the past 15 years attitudes toward business processes have changed significantly within organizations. What started with Total Quality Management initiatives and continued through Business Process Reengineering (BPR) projects of the early1990s has evolved into a comprehensive management practice that permeates both the business and the technology side of organizations. Business Process Management (BPM) can be defined as methods and tools surrounding the definition, implementation, and improvement of lateral processes in organizations. BPM tools and techniques play a significant role in both intra-organizational and inter-organizational process design. As BPM continues to gain importance in today’s organization, an increasing number of studies detail efficiency, effectiveness and agility improvements resulting from process management initiatives. Innovative industrial implementations and applications of BPM methods and techniques are of much interest today, given their potential for bringing significant gains to the enterprise through the automated coordination of activities, process participants and the integration of applications.

This mini-track seeks contributions that discuss the management of business processes as well as technologies for process automation. We encourage submissions from both a managerial as well as a technical perspective.

Selected best papers from the mini-track will be invited to the BPM special issue of the Australian Journal for Information Systems (AJIS).

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: February 26, 2010
Notification of acceptance: April 12, 2010
Camera Ready deadline: April 26, 2010
Conference: August 12-15, 2010

Special Issue of the Journal “Information Systems”

Management and Engineering of Process Aware Information Systems

Process-aware information systems are at the heart of an ongoing trend that has seen the attention of information systems engineers and managers shift from data and objects to the processes that the information system is intended to support, enable or enact. This trend has resulted in a myriad of approaches to support the analysis, design, implementation, execution and maintenance of information systems, ranging from those supported by groupware to those supported by workflow management systems and more recently business process management systems. We subsume such different information systems with a “process focus” under the umbrella of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS). A PAIS is a work system that supports the delivery of products and/or services to customers by processing information on the basis of explicit process models.

Process awareness has emerged as a guiding principle not only in the design and analysis of information systems, but also as a management discipline in its own right. As a result, PAIS are complex systems in which managerial and organizational aspects are often entangled with system analysis, design and implementation aspects. An integrated understanding of these complementary aspects is essential to reap the potential benefits of PAIS. However, management and engineering aspects of PAIS have to date mostly been studied separately. On the one hand, the information systems engineering community has concentrated on PAIS analysis, design and implementation, using for example case handling systems, workflow technology, business process management systems or service-oriented architectures. On the other hand, the information systems management community has focused on the impact of information systems technology to support process-oriented organizations, or the management of cultural and organizational change to enable process improvement. Overall these research streams have remained isolated from one another, and no studies exist that fully embrace the holistic and boundary-spanning nature of PAIS.

Scope and Aims

The aim of this special issue is to provide a forum to bridge the viewpoints of the information systems engineering community and the information systems management community, as it pertains to PAIS. The special issue explicitly advocates multi-disciplinary approaches that expand and integrate isolated research efforts in engineering and management of PAIS, or that bridge design-oriented with behavioral IS research efforts.

Of particular interest to the special issue are studies showing how management and organizational aspects have an impact on the design and implementation of business processes, or how emerging technology frameworks and paradigms (such as service-oriented architectures, Web 2.0 and cloud computing) affect the management and organization of PAIS. Accordingly, the special issue encourages studies that use a mixed or multiple-method approach spanning empirical research and design science.

To facilitate this integrated perspective into PAIS, the editorial board of this special issue brings together researchers from the management and engineering communities of PAIS research and who have a commitment to fostering open dialogue and knowledge sharing between these communities.

About the Journal

Information Systems is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by Elsevier that publishes articles concerning the design and implementation of languages, data models, algorithms, software and hardware for information systems. Its current impact factor is 1.660 and its five-year impact factor is 2.261.

Topics

The special issue will solicit submissions that address any phenomenon or problem that can be ascribed to PAIS. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• success, failure and contingency models for PAIS
• usability, effectiveness and efficiency studies of PAIS
• PAIS-related standards, their development, adoption, and use
• PAIS modeling and design methods
• management of process model repositories
• collaborative process modeling and PAIS-enabled process collaboration
• open-source software for PAIS
• service-oriented and cloud-based architectures for PAIS
• PAIS monitoring and performance measurement
• decision support in the context of PAIS
• impact of emerging technology on PAIS management
• flexibility and change management in PAIS
• philosophical and methodological issues in research on PAIS
• industry-specific requirements towards PAIS
• learning and education in PAIS
• PAIS lifecycle management
• strategic alignment of PAIS
• governance of PAIS

Review Process

All submissions will be peer-reviewed in accordance with the reviewing standards of the journal of Information Systems. This special issue follows a developmental review process. The objective is to apply very high standards of acceptance while ensuring fair, timely and efficient review cycles. The submissions will be reviewed by the editors, with the assistance of a group of invited domain experts. The editors will provide their recommendations and feedback to the authors for revision and development of the submitted papers. The objectives are to: (1) provide a timely turnaround so that authors get a clear indication of the reactions to their work, (2) enable promising works to develop into solid publishable material, (3) improve the success rates of high quality work by providing feedback at each developmental milestone and (4) ensure the high quality standards of IS in an efficient manner.

The papers that successfully complete this stage will be invited to submit a revised version to the final peer review phase. Final acceptance decisions will be made after authors received the chance to respond to the second-round review, if required.

Schedule

• Full initial paper submission deadline: 15 January 2010
• 1st round feedback: 15 April 2010
• Revised paper submission deadline: 1 October 2010
• 2nd round feedback: 1 January 2011
• Final paper submission deadline: 15 April 2011
• Acceptance decision deadline: 15 May 2011
• Camera-ready paper submission deadline: 15 June 2011
• Publication of special issue: 4th quarter 2011

Submission

Full manuscripts must be submitted via the online submission system. Please indicate that this is a submission to the Special Issue on Engineering and Management of PAIS. Authors should follow the guidelines for submissions to Information Systems, available from the Elsevier homepage.

Manuscripts typically do not exceed 30 pages in length.

Guest Editors:

• Marlon Dumas, University of Tartu, Estonia
• Jan Recker, Queensland University of Technology. Australia.
• Mathias Weske, HPI, University of Potsdam, Germany.

Editor Bios

Dr Marlon Dumas is Professor of Software Engineering at University of Tartu, Estonia. From 2000 to 2007, he held various academic appointments at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He has also been visiting professor at University of Grenoble (France) and visiting researcher at SAP Research, Australia. His research interests include Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Technology. His research findings have been published in journals such as ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He was program co-chair of the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2008). He holds two patents in the field of BPM, and several other pending patent applications. He is co-editor of a textbook on Process-Aware Information Systems (John Wiley and Sons, 2005).

Dr Jan Recker is Senior Lecturer in the Information Systems Discipline and leader of the Process Design research program at Queensland University of Technology. His main areas of research include methods and extensions for business process design and the usage of process design in organizational practice. He has been the author of more than 75 journal articles and conference papers on these topics, including publications in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems, the European Journal of Information Systems, the Communications of the Association for Information Systems, the Australasian Journal of Information Systems, the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, and others. Jan is a member of the editorial board of two international journals and serves on the program committee of various IS conferences.

Dr Mathias Weske is Professor of Computer Science and chair of the business process technology research group at Hasso Plattner Institute at University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests include business process modelling and analysis, process choreographies, modelling methodologies, and service computing. He leads Oryx, an open source project on business process management. Dr. Weske has published over 80 scientific papers and twelve books, including a textbook on business process management. He is on the steering committee of the BPM conference series. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and GI, and he is the chairperson of EMISA, the German Computer Science Society Special Interest Group on Development Methods for Information Systems and their Application.

BPM 2010 – Call for Papers

8th International Conference on Business Process Management

Hoboken, New Jersey
September 13-16, 2010

The importance of effective Business Process Management (BPM) continues to rise as regional and global economies strive for increased insight, understanding and efficiency around business operations in the context of further globalization, further distribution and virtualization of businesses, and further coordination and interoperation of business activities through automated mechanisms. BPM 2010 is the eighth conference in a series that provides the most distinguished research forum for researchers and practitioners in all aspects of BPM including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, systems, and empirical findings. With an acceptance rate in previous editions at around 15% the conference has a record of attracting innovative research of highest quality, from a mix of disciplines including Computer Science, Management Information Science, Services Computing, Services Science, and Technology Management.

This year’s conference will continue with the broad-based themes of previous editions, and strives to strengthen and expand in several key directions. The conference especially encourages emerging research on new conceptual models for BPM understood broadly, models that attempt to unify core aspects of BPM, including process management, data management, business rules and requirements, and analytics, that until recently have been represented using rather disparate conceptual models. The conference also encourages the increasing interest in applying established and new techniques, such as model-driven architectures, Web services and Web architectures, SOA, and Cloud Computing , to the specific challenges of BPM. Finally, the conference seeks to attract papers that highlight the pervasive need for BPM capabilities across application areas outside of business management, including healthcare delivery, digital government, disaster management, and management of scientific and other academic endeavors, and that highlight how new techniques can solve the distinctive challenges arising in those diverse areas. Awards will be given to the best papers in different categories.

BPM 2010 will be held at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, just minutes from downtown Manhattan. Information about Stevens, how to reach it, etc.. are given on this website.
Research topics include, but are not limited to:

MODELING AND THEORY OF BUSINESS OPERATIONS AND PROCESSES
-Process modeling languages, notations and methods
-Data-aware and data-centric approaches to BPM
-Reference process models
-Variability and configuration of process models
-Process simulation and static analysis
-Automated process composition and synthesis
-Process metadata and semantic reasoning
-Process patterns and standards
-Foundations of business process models

PROCESS ARCHITECTURES AND PLATFORMS
-Process-oriented software architectures
-Service-oriented architectures for BPM
-Workflow management systems and infrastructure
-Security aspects of business process execution
-Automated planning for business process execution
-Resource management in business process execution
-Process componentization and component repositories
-Distributed process execution
-Cloud computing in support of BPM

MANAGEMENT OF PROCESS EXECUTION DATA
-Models and theory of workflow as data
-Process tracing and monitoring
-Process performance measurement
-Process mining and learning
-Process data warehousing
-Data streaming in business processes

PROCESS EVOLUTION AND FLEXIBILITY
-Process exception handling
-Process change management
-Monitoring and provenance across change
-Adaptive and context-aware processes
-Case handling
-Process-enhanced groupware

HUMAN-CENTRIC BPM
-People-intensive processes
-User-centric aspects of BPM design
-User-centric aspects of process management and use
-Cross-organizational processes
-Globally distributed process management
-Integrating strategy, process, people and IT
-Task sourcing through social networks

NON-TRADITIONAL BPM SCENARIOS
-Knowledge-intensive processes
-Data-driven business processes
-Distributed and mobile processes
-Inter-process planning and coordination

MANAGEMENT ISSUES AND EMPIRICAL STUDIES
-Business process lifecycle management
-Relationship of business strategy and business process
-Success factors and measures in BPM
-BPM governance and compliance management
-BPM Maturity
-Adoption and Practice of BPM
-Case Studies and Experience Reports in BPM
-BPM in support of business networks

Conference Paper Submission
BPM 2010 invites research submissions on all topics related to business process management, including but not limited to those listed above. Research papers should be submitted electronically via the EasyChair system. All submissions must be received no later than March 14, 2010. Submission details and formatting instructions are given at the website. All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in their LNCS series. For each accepted paper, at least one author is required to register for the conference and should plan to present the paper. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper to a special issue of Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE, an Elsevier Science Journal).

Additional Conference Activities
The BPM 2010 conference will include a diverse set of tracks and activities in addition to the main research track. As with previous editions of the conference, there will be several associated workshops that explore newly emerging approaches, methods, and technologies in the BPM space. All or most of these workshops will be held on Monday, September 13. The Demo Track will showcase new, innovative systems that illustrate key BPM functionalities. The proceedings of the workshops, and short papers describing the demos, will be published in a volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). The Industrial Experiences track aims at bridging the viewpoints of leading research outcomes with practical demands and industrial experience; practitioners are encouraged to submit papers reporting on innovative industrial implementations and applications of BPM methods and techniques, with a particular emphasis on their impact on information technology use or business practice. The conference will include tutorials on cutting-edge frameworks and associated principled techniques for solving BPM challenges. An education track will focus on emerging techniques, practices, and experiences for teaching the principles and pragmatics of business process management at the university level. Finally, there are plans for a Doctoral Consortium to be held during the weekend preceding the conference, that will provide students in advanced stages of their dissertation work an opportunity to share their research with peers, world-class researchers, and industry experts in Business Process Management.

Conference Committee:

General Chairs
Michael zur Muehlen, Stevens Institute of Technology
Henry Chang, IBM Research

Program Chairs
Rick Hull, IBM Research
Stefan Tai, Universität Karlsruhe
Jan Mendling, Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Industry Chair
Michael Rosemann, Queensland University of Technology

Workshop Chair
Jianwen Su, University of California, Santa Barbara

Doctoral Consortium Chair
Ted Stohr, Stevens Institute of Technology

Demo Chair
Marcello La Rosa, Queensland University of Technology

Steering Committee
Wil van der Aalst (chair), Eindhoven University of Technology
Boualem Benatallah, University of New South Wales
Fabio Casati, University of Trento
Peter Dadam, University of Ulm
Joerg Desel, Catholic University Eichstätt
Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology
Arthur ter Hofstede, Queensland Univ. of Technology
Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano
Matthias Weske, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, University of Potsdam

How can the understandability of business process models be improved? This question is the focus of a study conducted by the Humboldt University of Berlin, Eindhoven University of Technology and the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

We would like to ask you to consider taking a few minutes of your time to complete the online survey on process model understandability. The questionnaire has been designed for users of EPCs (Event-driven Process Chains), which means that anyone that uses EPCs to create business process models for whatever purpose is welcome and encouraged to participate.

As an incentive to participate we offer you free access to the results of the study as well as the chance to win one of three copies of the recently released textbook

For a chance to win this textbook please provide your contact details at the end of the survey.

Many thanks for participating in this important study.

All the best,

4th International Workshop on Business Process Design

Milan, Italy, 1 September 2008

To be held in conjunction with
the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management

Workshop Background and Goals

Conscious (re)design of business processes is a powerful means for the pro-active improvement of process performance as well as for the more re-active achievement of higher process conformance. Despite its popularity and obvious pay-offs, process design is still more art than science. Many handbooks on the subject remain vague about how to actually derive superior process designs. The practice of business process design tends to rely on the creativity of business professionals to come up with new process lay-outs, but the outcomes of such efforts are hard to predict. Scientific approaches so far have focused often on only small, well-understood business domains. Overall, much more attention is devoted to process modeling techniques and standards. In a way, this is similar to agreeing on the language, without knowing what to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

6th International Conference on Business Process Management

Milan, Italy, 1-4 September 2008

BPM 2008 is the sixth conference in a series that provides the most distinguished specialized forum for researchers and practitioners in business process management (BPM). The conference has a record of attracting innovative research of highest quality related to all aspects of business process management including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, and empirical findings.
Traditionally, the BPM conference attracts the most prestigious researchers in the field and abides to the highest academic standards. Each submission is reviewed by at least three reviewers, and the acceptance rate in previous editions has been around 14%. The BPM conference also aims at bridging the viewpoints of leading research outcomes with practical demands.
In addition to the main research track, BPM 2008 will include an industrial papers track. Accordingly, the conference encourages industry practitioners to submit experience and application papers reporting on innovative industrial implementations and applications of business process management methods and techniques, with particular focus on their impact on information technology use or business practice. These papers have to go beyond mature prototypes and potentially applicable methods and techniques, and must draw upon industry experience or empirical data.
Awards will be given to the best papers in different categories. In addition, authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper to a special issue of Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE, an Elsevier Science Journal).
BPM 2008 will be held in Milan, Italy and will be organized by the Information Systems group of the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano. The Politecnico di Milano is a Technical University in Italy, established in 1863, offering degrees in Engineering, Architecture, and Industrial Design, with approximately 42,000 students. The event will be conducted at the main Leonardo Campus of Politecnico di Miano. The campus is located in the scientific university area of Milan, with an easy access from the town center. With 1.3 million people, Milan offers a continuously growing environment for the development of technological services, fashion and design.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

PROCESS MODELING AND ANALYSIS
- Process modeling languages, notations and methods
- Reference process models
- Variability and configuration of process models
- Process simulation and static analysis
- Process metadata and semantic reasoning
- Process patterns, repositories, and standards

PROCESS ARCHITECTURES AND PLATFORMS
- Process-oriented software architectures
- Service-oriented architectures for BPM
- Workflow management systems
- Security aspects of business process execution
- Automated planning for business process execution
- Resource management in business process execution

MANAGEMENT OF PROCESS EXECUTION DATA
- Process tracing and monitoring
- Process performance measurement
- Process mining and learning
- Process data warehousing
- Data streaming in business processes

PROCESS EVOLUTION AND FLEXIBILITY
- Process exception handling
- Process change management
- Adaptive and context-aware processes
- Case handling
- Process-enhanced groupware

NON-TRADITIONAL BPM SCENARIOS
- Knowledge-intensive processes
- Data-driven processes
- Distributed and mobile processes
- Inter-process planning and coordination
- Grid and scientific workflows

MANAGEMENT ISSUES AND EMPIRICAL STUDIES
- Business process lifecycle management
- Success factors and measures in BPM
- BPM governance and compliance management
- BPM maturity
- Adoption and practice of BPM
- Case Studies and Experience Reports in BPM

Conference Paper Submission
BPM 2008 invites research submissions on all topics related to business process management, including but not limited to those listed above. Research papers should be submitted electronically via the BPM 2008 web site by uploading a self-contained PDF file. All submissions must be received no later than 21 March 2008 at 11:59 pm Western Samoa time.
Research papers must be in English. They must be original research contributions that have not been published previously, nor already submitted to other conferences or journals in parallel with this conference. The length of the paper should not exceed 16 pages. Papers should be formatted in LNCS format (for details see www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). The title page must contain a short abstract and a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above. The paper must clearly state the research problem being addressed, the goal of the work, the results achieved, and the relation to other work. Submissions received too late, in another format than PDF, or sent by fax or post will be rejected. The same will happen with papers which are not in English or exceed the page limit.
Industrial papers must follow the same format requirements and length constraints as research papers. All industrial submissions will be treated in the same way as research papers regarding review process and quality requirements.
All accepted papers will be contained in the conference proceedings published by Springer-Verlag. For each accepted paper, at least one author should register to the conference and should plan to present the paper.

Demonstrations
Submissions are invited for demos to be included in the BPM 2008 Demonstration Track. The demo track is intended to showcase innovative business process management tools and applications, and will provide an opportunity to show and discuss emerging technologies with researchers and practitioners in the BPM field.
All demonstration proposals should consist of two parts. The first part (maximum four pages) should contain a short description of the system, a summary of its novel characteristics, a statement on the scope and limitations of the system and its significance to the field of BPM, and the list of functions and features to be demonstrated. This part will be included in the proceedings in case of acceptance. The second part is an appendix of no longer than six pages explaining the demonstrated scenario and illustrating how the presentation will be conducted (i.e. the demo script) and possibly some screenshots. This part will not be included in the proceedings but is valuable input for the review process. Authors are encouraged to include in their submissions links to mockups, videos, or animations of the proposed demonstration. Submissions must adhere to the conference paper submission formatting guidelines and are limited to four pages for the first part and six for the appendix. Demo proposals should be submitted at the BPM conference submission system.
Demo proposals will undergo a strict review process in line with that of the main conference. Demo proposals will be assessed on the basis of their innovation, technical advances and challenges, overall practical attractiveness, relevance and presentation. All accepted demo proposals (without appendix) will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer-Verlag. There will be a best demo award based on the demo proposal and the presentation at the conference.

Tutorials and Panel Discussions
Tutorials and panel discussions will complement the core of the BPM 2008 conference. Tutorials will provide the opportunity to introduce one selected topic and to discuss related trends and challenges. Panel discussions will allow the open conversation of BPM-related topics. The local organizers are able to facilitate contacts to local industry representatives, if this is of interest for an organizer of a panel.
Proposals for tutorials and panel discussions should include: the title; name, brief biography of each participant; an outline of the theme, goals, planned activities and intended audience. Proposals should be submitted in electronic form (plain text or PDF) to the Tutorial/Panel Chairs.

Conference Dates
Paper submission deadline (strict): 21 March 2008
Notification of acceptance: 12 May 2008
Camera-ready papers deadline: 13 June 2008
Conference: 2-4 September 2008

Workshop Dates
Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 16 May 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 16 June 2008
Camera-ready papers deadline: 7 July 2008
Workshops: 1 September 2008

Demo Dates
Deadline for demo submissions: 21 March 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 12 May 2008
Camera-ready papers deadline: 13 June 2008
Demos: 2-4 September 2008

Tutorial / Panel Dates
Deadline for submissions: 16 May 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 16 June 2008
Tutorials: 2-4 September 2008
Panels: 2-3 September 2008

General Chairs
Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Fabio Casati, University of Trento, Italy

Program Chairs:
Marlon Dumas, University of Tartu, Estonia & Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Manfred Reichert, University of Ulm, Germany

Industry Chair:
Ming-Chien Shan, SAP Labs Palo Alto, USA

Organization Chair:
Danilo Ardagna, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Industry Sponsorship Chair:
Chiara Francalanci, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Workshop Chairs:
Massimo Mecella, Universita di Roma La Sapienza, Italy
Jian Yang, Macquarie University, Australia

Demo Chairs
Malu Castellanos, HP Labs Palo Alto, USA
Andreas Wombacher, EPFL, Switzerland

Tutorial/Panel Chairs:
Vincenzo d’Andrea, University of Trento, Italy
Heiko Ludwig, IBM Watson Research Center, USA