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 »

Process mining techniques allow for extracting information from event logs, e.g. as generared by operational workflow management systems. It is a field that receives wide attention from the academic BPM community and is increasingly being applied in organizational settings. The Process Mining Wiki at http://www.process-mining.org presents the research done in the context of the ProM framework. The associated software can be downloaded from http://prom.sourceforge.net.

The Global Journal on Flexible Systems Management is soliciting submission to a special issue on Business Process Management: Impact on Organizational Flexibility. Deadline for submissions is January 15th, 2008. Paper proposals can be submitted until September 30th, 2007. More information can be found 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.

Welcome to the new website of the Association for Information Systems‘ special interest group on process automation and management (sigpam). After a long-needed overhaul, we hope that this new blog and the associated discussion forum will provide a meeting ground and exchange place for researchers interested in the management and automation of business processes.