4th International Workshop on Business Process Design

Milan, Italy, 1 September 2008
http://workshop.process-redesign.org

To be held in conjunction with
the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (http://bpm08.polimi.it/)

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.

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6th International Conference on Business Process Management

Milan, Italy, 1-4 September 2008
http://bpm08.polimi.it

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

FIRST INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON GOVERNANCE, RISK AND COMPLIANCE - APPLICATIONS IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GRCIS’08)

Website: http://www.grcis.com

17 June, 2008
Montpellier, France
In conjunction with CAiSE’08

BACKGROUND
Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) are rapidly emerging challenges for enterprise systems designers. The significance of these topics 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. Compliance related software and services are expected to reach a market value of over $27billion this year. At the same time, facilitating compliant business process execution is increasingly complex due to the growing 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 standards and contractual obligations. We expect Governance, Risk and Compliance to play a significant part in several applications, from transaction systems to management reporting infrastructures. GRC 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, the extension of process and service modeling and execution frameworks for compliance and risk management, and the detection of policy violations.

This workshop will provide a forum for researchers from diverse backgrounds that contribute to this emerging area and will 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:

* Compliance and Risk Modeling
* Policy definition and enforcement
* Compliant service and process design
* 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 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. Efforts are underway to secure a Special Issue of a journal publication for selected papers of exceptional quality accepted for the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission February 22, 2008
Notification of acceptance March 21, 2008
Camera ready due April 8, 2008
Workshop June 17, 2008

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Papers should be submitted in PDF format. 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. Information about the Springer LNCS format can be found at www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. 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 found at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=grcis08

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

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

CONTACT
Email: grcis@business.uq.edu.au

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Sami Bhiri, National University of Ireland
Wojciech Cellary, The Poznan University of Economics
Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong
Peter Green, The University of Queensland
Daniela Grigori, UniversitÈ de Versailles St-Quentin en Yvelines
Guido Governatori, The University of Queensland
Jochen Kuester, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
Zoran Milosevic, Deontik Pty Ltd
Olivier Perrin, University Henri Poincare
Michael Rosemann, Queensland University of Technology
Andreas Schaad, SAP Research Karlsruhe
Edward A. Stohr, Stevens Institute of Technology
Paolo Torroni, Universit‡ di Bologna
Yathi Udupi, North Carolina State University
Jan Vanthienen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Julien Vayssiere, SAP Research Brisbane

Website: http://plattformen.fhnw.ch/aibr2008/

Call for Papers:

Knowledge Representation in general and Rule Based Representations in particular, are core areas of Artificial Intelligence. Research in these areas strongly influences standards on the web like RuleML or the W3C standards OWL and SWRL. Advancing the theoretical underpinnings and practical impact of these technologies will be an ongoing challenge.

On the other hand, Business Rules and Semantic Business Process Management are growing research and application areas. Business Rules strive to meet the increasing requirements of transparency and compliance: making sure that all stakeholders comply with all rules and regulations at any place and any time. Business Processes are derived form the strategy of an enterprise, and define the requirements of information systems. Here, AI methods such as Semantic Modelling, Knowledge Validation, Automated Planning and Intelligent Agents will play ever increasing roles.

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The AMCIS 2007 was recently held in Keystone, Colorado (August 9-12, 2007). The SIGPAM sponsored minitrack on Business Process Automation and Management was organized by co-chairs Amit V. Deokar, Michael zur Muehlen, and Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr. The minitrack received a good response from researchers in this field and triggered some interesting discussions. The following four papers were presented during this minitrack:

1. Integration of a Business Rules Engine to Manage Frequently Changing Workflow: A Case Study of Insurance Underwriting Workflow by George K. Royce
2. Towards Enhanced Business Process Models Based on Fuzzy Attributes and Rules by Oliver Thomas, Thorsten Dollmann, and Peter Loos (Presentation)
3. Are We There Yet? Seamless Mapping of BPMN to BPEL4WS by Marta Indulska, Jan Recker, Peter Green, and Michael Rosemann (Presentation)
4. An Approach for Capacity Planning of Web Service Workflows by Julian Eckert, Nicolas Repp, Stefan Schulte, Rainer Berbner, and Ralf Steinmetz

Call for Papers

Special Issue on Collaborative Business Processes
Information System Frontiers (ISF)

http://www.som.buffalo.edu/isinterface/ISFrontiers/forthcoming.htm

Recent years have seen the trend of business globalisation which urgently requires dynamical collaboration among organisations. The business processes of different organisations need to be integrated seamlessly to adapt the continuously changing business conditions and to stay competitive in the global market. Though current business process technologies have achieved a certain level, there is still a large room between the current supports and the requirements from real collaboration scenarios. Especially in a loosely coupled collaboration environment, many non-functional yet crucial aspects, such as privacy and security, reliability and flexibility, scalability and agility, process validation, QoS guarantees, etc., are with a great lack of sufficient supports. This gap in turn obstructs the further advancement and wider application of business process technologies. Therefore, more academic research, facilitating infrastructure, protocols and standards are being expected to shift current business process management for supporting collaborative business processes.

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Call for Papers

Cutter IT Journal
Bartosz Kiepuszewski, Guest Editor
Abstract Submission Date: 23 August 2007
Articles Due: 25 September 2007

“Business Process Management: A Broken Promise or the Building Blocks of Modern Enterprise Architecture?”

Business process management (BPM) is a concept that has been alive in the IT world for many years under various names and labels. I will not even attempt to precisely define it, for — similar to many vague IT concepts belonging more in marketing than engineering — a clear and crisp definition is hard to come by. However, the ability to graphically define a business process and then automate it, or to use a computer to execute it with little or no extra programming required, has been with us for years.

In the client-server era of the 1990s, BPM tools were called workflow management systems. The main vendors from this era — FileNet, Staffware, IBM and many others — provided us with so-called workflow engines that, based on a process definition, routed work between process participants, be they human actors or computer machines. Back then, the Workflow Management Coalition was formed with the aim of standardizing the architecture and interfaces of typical workflow systems. The tide then shifted toward enterprise architectures, and problems related to enterprise architecture integration (EAI) in particular. Read the rest of this entry »

Fourth Workshop XML4BPM

XML Integration and Transformation for Business Process Management

held as a track of Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2008 in Munich (Germany), 26 - 28 February 2008. For Details refer to the Workshop Website. The submission deadline is September 30th, 2007.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Transformation of BPM-models and -schemas,
• Model-driven development of BPM applications,
• Integration of BPM applications,
• Application of Web Services and Semantic Web technologies for BPM,
• Metamodels, XML schemas, and ontologies for BPM,
• Definition and application of XML-based reference models for BPM,
• Evaluation and comparison of BPM standards,
• BPEL, WS-CDL, BPSS, PNML, EPML, XPDL, XMI, etc. and their application in BPM,
• Inter-organizational document exchange (e.g. XML-EDI, xCBL, etc.).

Workflow Patterns Website (http://www.workflowpatterns.com/)

The Workflow Patterns initiative in started in 1999. The aim of this initiative is to provide a conceptual basis for process technology. In particular, the research provides a thorough examination of the various perspectives (control flow, data, resource, and exception handling) that need to be supported by a workflow language or a business process modeling language. The results can be used for examining the suitability of a particular process language or workflow system for a particular project, assessing relative strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to process specification, implementing certain business requirements in a particular process-aware information system, and as a basis for language and tool development. Read the rest of this entry »

BPM 2007 is the fifth installation in a conference series that provides the leading global forum for researchers and practitioners in all aspects of Business Process Management. BPM 2007 will be held from 24-28 September 2007 in Brisbane, Australia and is organized by the Business Process Management Research Group, Faculty of Information Technology of the Queensland University of Technology.

The academic program follows the highest academic standards and the acceptance rate has been 15%. Traditionally, the BPM conference attracts the most prestigious researchers in all areas of Business Process Management. In 2007, we will complement the strong academic program Read the rest of this entry »