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 or m.larosa@qut.edu.au

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 or m.larosa@qut.edu.au

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 or j.recker@qut.edu.au

Open to:                                                    Australian and International Applicants.

More information on these positions can be found at http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/about/opportunities/index.jsp#positions.

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.

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/236/description

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 for Information Systems (http://ees.elsevier.com/is/). 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:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/236/authorinstructions

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.