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
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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
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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
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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
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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 Journal on Enterprise Modeling and Information System Architectures is soliciting submissions to a special issue on Process Modeling. Deadline for submissions is November 30th, 2007. More information can be found here.