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:

For more information see http://www.bpm2010.org/call-for-papers/call-for-industry-contributions/

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

Contact: info@bpm2010.org

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.

You will find the online survey under http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/understanding.

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

J. Mendling: Process Model Metrics. 64,95 Euro. Springer-Verlag 2008

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,

Jan Mendling, Jan Recker, and Hajo Reijers

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.

The aim of this workshop is to continue the ongoing and successful discussions of the last three BPD workshops to further nurture a body of knowledge on the disciplined, well-understood and appropriately evaluated design of business processes.

We have witnessed in the previous BPD workshops that besides research on BPD methodologies, there is a trend and a focus on addressing constraints in process design, user involvement, process reference models and process design quality.  Papers that introduce innovative tools for process design as well as soft issues (human aspects) and quantitative aspects (e.g. financial evaluation of proposed process improvements) will be particularly welcome.

We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners who have an interest in advancing the state of the art in process design (as in contrast to mere process modeling). We seek contributions by authors who wish to share their innovative ideas and remarkable observations on the subject. Two main categories of submissions/presentations will be considered: a) regular papers and b) industry papers. All submissions have to follow the procedure explained below under the heading “Paper Submission”.

Topics

Topics of the workshop include but are not limited to:

- Process design methods and methodologies
- Process design tools
- Process reference models
- Process innovation
- Constraints in process design (e.g. legislative requirements, compliance)
- Process design governance
- Human aspects in process design
- Use and development of industry blueprints/reference models
- Issues related to process design in large projects
- Linking process design to the design of strategies
- Process design quality
- User involvement, collaboration, coordination
- Maintenance of process designs
- Success factors in process design
- Case studies and experiments

Format of the Workshop

The workshop will consist of presentations of the accepted papers and additional key-notes speakers. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings published by Springer-Verlag as a post-proceeding volume in their Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.
At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and plan to present the paper.

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted, and the length of the paper should not exceed 12 pages. Papers should be formatted in the new LNBIP format (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-487211-0 for details). The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above. Papers should be submitted electronically via the BPM 2008 web site. Please upload a self-contained PDF file. All submissions must be received no later than May 23rd, 2008.

Important dates

• Paper submission deadline: 23 May 2008
• Notification of acceptance: 27 June 2008
• Camera ready: 6 July 2008 (strict deadline)
• Papers sent to the Workshop Chairs for inclusion on a CD distributed at the conference and/or a WWW site: 10 July 2008
• Workshop day: 1 September 2008
• Post-proceedings version of the paper (reviewed on the basis of the discussion) by authors to workshop organizers: 23 September 2008
• Delivery to authors and workshop organizers: Christmas 2008

Co-Chairs

Hajo A. Reijers (h.a.reijers@tue.nl)
Department of Technology Management
Eindhoven University of Technology
5600 MB, Pav.D14, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Selma Limam Mansar (selmal@andrew.cmu.edu)
Carnegie Mellon University
Qatar Campus,
PO BOX 24866, Doha, Qatar

Michael Rosemann (m.rosemann@qut.edu.au)
Business Process Management Research Group
Queensland University of Technology
Level 5 / 126 Margaret Street, Brisbane Qld 4000, Australia

Workshop Program Committee (tentative)

Wil van der Aalst (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Saïd Assar (Télécom & Management Sud Paris, France)
Hyerim Bae (Pusan National University, South-Korea)
Jorge Cardoso (SAP Research, Germany)
Lynn Carter (Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar)
Peter Green (University of Queensland, Australia)
Lilia Gzara (Université Henri Poincaré, France)
Kees van Hee (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Stefan Jablonski (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
Monique Jansen-Vullers (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Peter Kueng (Credit Suisse, Switzerland)
Jan Mendling (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Michael zur Muehlen (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA)
Trevor Naidoo (Oracle, USA)
Stephan Poelmans (VLEKHO Business School, Belgium)
Manfred Reichert (University of Ulm, Germany)
Stefanie Rinderle (University of Ulm, Germany)
Mike Soanes (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Roger Tregear (Leonardo Consulting, Australia)
Irene Vanderfeesten (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)

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.

Both areas- Business Rules and Business Process Management-make use of model driven knowledge representations, often in conjunction with application-oriented modeling tools. In the last few years, both communities have realized the potential of knowledge representations with precise semantics. For example, OMG is bringing semantics into business rules with SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules), although without making full use of the benefits and standards already achieved with AI’s semantic technologies in the Semantic Web and Ontology Engineering. Similar observations can be made for other aspects of rule based systems that have already been addressed earlier within AI (e.g. rule capture, inferencing and explanation).

While standards for business process definition and execution have been put forward by OMG, WfMC, and OASIS, there is increasing research interest in combining business processes with semantic technologies. In particular, the concept of Semantic Web Services promises a new level of agility in process execution where AI can contribute insights and technologies from knowledge representation, reasoning and planning.

Generally, the areas of ‘Business Rules’, ‘Semantic Technologies’ and ‘Business Process Management’ are addressed by different communities at present. The symposium aims to bringing together researchers and practitioners from all three communities to educate and inspire each other in order to avoid pitfalls and provide the basis for synergetic cooperation, with the aim of identifying and advancing the most promising points of cross-fertilization.

Submission:

Prospective participants are invited to submit research papers (up to 12 pages) or position papers (up to 4 pages) papers, in PDF format, via the symposium website http://www.easychair.org/AIBR2008/.

Papers should be prepared using the format for AAAI Press proceedings or technical reports. More details on manuscript preparation are available at the AAAI Press Author Instructions page (http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php).

All submissions will be reviewed by the program committee.

Important Deadlines:

• October 5, 2007: Submissions due to organizers
• November 2, 2007: Notifications of acceptance sent by organizers
• January 25, 2008: Accepted camera-ready copy due to AAAI.

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

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.

Topic Scope
——————-
The scope of this special issue falls in collaborative business process management field. The special issue will cover the scope of research relevant to collaborative business processes, including, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Contracting for business collaboration
• Process discovery in business collaboration
• Process composition in business collaboration
• Service matching in business collaboration
• Change management in business collaboration
• Process evolvement in business collaboration
• Process migration in business collaboration
• Access control in business collaboration
• Privacy and confidentiality management in business collaboration
• Autonomy in business collaboration
• Authorisation management in business collaboration
• Collaborative business process modelling
• Engines for collaborative business processes
• Verification and validation of collaborative business process models
• Performance assessment on collaborative business processes
• Monitoring and tracking over collaborative business processes
• Architectures and infrastructures for collaborative business processes
• Protocols for collaborative business processes
• Choreography and orchestration in collaborative business processes
• Collaborative business processes in Web service environment
• Collaborative business processes in Grid or P2P environment
• Case studies of collaborative business processes
• Collaborative business process applications, such as supply chain and virtual organisation alliance
• Other facilitating technologies for collaborative business process

Important Dates
——————-
1 October 2007 Deadline for submissions to the special issue
30 January 2008 Notification of acceptance
28 February 2008 Deadline for camera-ready papers
Middle or late 2008 Publication

Submission Instructions
——————-
Manuscripts must be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word or PDF format no later than October 1, 2007 to Xiaohui Zhao at: xzhao@ict.swin.edu.au. Manuscripts should be within 25 pages long, double space, including references. More information for manuscript style can be found at Springer’s website (www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,4-170-70-35673075-0,00.html). Revised submissions of the works appear in the workshop on Collaborative Business Processes (CBP 2007, www.ict.swin.edu.au/conferences/cbp2007) will be automatically considered for this special issue. All other manuscripts must not have been previously published or currently submitted for journal publication elsewhere. All submissions will be peer reviewed.

Guest Editors
——————-
Assoc.Prof. Chengfei Liu
cliu@ict.swin.edu.au
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Victoria, 3122
Australia

Prof. Qing Li
itqli@cityu.edu.hk
Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong
Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon
Hong Kong, China

Xiaohui Zhao
xzhao@ict.swin.edu.au
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Victoria, 3122
Australia

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. As automatic management of business processes was seen as one of the cornerstones of advanced EAI solutions, we saw leading EAI vendors putting BPM engines on top of their EAI suites. One of the ways many EAI vendors attempted to fill the void in their EAI suite was actually to acquire the former workflow vendor.

Today’s advanced EA concepts revolve around the idea of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Not surprisingly, BPM again is seen as an important (or, perhaps fundamental) building block of SOA. Since SOA — much more than former EAI attempts — focuses on standards, we have witnessed a “BPM standards war” with Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) emerging as a clear winner.

Since I started working on BPM-related issues back in mid-1990s, one thing has not changed — the marketing hype. Business users are led to believe that they can effortlessly, without IT intervention, change business processes on the fly and that they will be able to quickly assemble new business processes from predefined “building blocks” as their business changes.

This however, is not the case. From a theoretical point of view, business process management is, to put it simply, tough. To name a few problems, we still don’t seem to agree on a theoretical foundation for BPM, there are very complex issues associated with transaction management of long-running processes, and modeling languages lack the formal semantics necessary for easy interoperability. Is the BPM hype justified, or have we not made much progress from its inception in the last decade?

The November 2007 Cutter IT Journal invites useful and thoughtful debate on the issues surrounding the current state of business process management and the challenges facing organizations in their attempts to implement BPM strategies.

TOPICS OF INTEREST MAY INCLUDE (but are certainly not limited to) one or a combination of the following:

• Is BPM only marketing hype or can it realistically automate business processes?
• What are the current challenges in implementing BPM and how can organizations overcome these challenges?
• What are the different BPM tools available in the marketplace and what is their role in a modern IT infrastructure?
• How does an enterprise determine what tool is appropriate and how it should be implemented?
• How can organizations go about managing the process of process management?
• Describe case studies of successful and/or failed BPM deployments.
• What are the current best practices related to BPM in SOA projects?
• Are there any roadmaps or guidelines for organizational deployment of BPM-related standards such as BPEL, XPDL, WS-CDL, and so on?
• What can organizations realistically expect from a BPM solution?
• What should IT’s role be in determining how a BPM strategy is selected, implemented, and maintained?
• What role should business play in a BPM strategy, and how are differences that arise between IT and the business to be resolved?

TO SUBMIT AN ARTICLE IDEA

Please respond to Bartosz Kiepuszewski, bkiepuszewski [at]cutter[dot]com, with a copy to itjournal[at]cutter[dot]com, no later than 23 August 2007, and include an extended abstract and a short article outline showing major discussion points.

ARTICLE DEADLINE
Articles are due on 25 September 2007

EDITORIAL GUIDELINES
Most Cutter IT Journal articles are approximately 2,500-3,500 words long, plus whatever graphics are appropriate. If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to contact CITJ’s Group Publisher, Christine Generali, at cgenerali[at]cutter[dot]com or the Guest Editor, Bartosz Kiepuszewski, at bkiepuszewski [at]cutter[dot]com. Editorial guidelines are available here.

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.

On the web site http://www.workflowpatterns.com/ you will find detailed descriptions of patterns for the various perspectives relevant for process-aware information systems: control-flow, data, resource, and exception handling. In addition you will find detailed evaluations of various process languages, (proposed) standards for web service compositions, and workflow systems in terms of this patterns.

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 with a series of co-located events including the “4th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods”, the “1st International Workshop on Managing Business Processes in the Government” and the “1st International Workshop on BPM Governance”, six BPM-related workshops, three tutorials, panel discussions and an industry-only one-day event on Business Process Management. The latter one will be targeted towards the world’s leading BPM practitioners.

22 full papers and 8 short papers have been accepted for the BPM 2007 conference out of a pool of 152 submissions from 41 countries. The list of accepted papers can be found here.