Business process management is fast becoming one of the most important approaches for designing contemporary organizations and information systems. A critical component of business process management is business process modelling. It is widely accepted that modelling of business processes from scratch is a complex, time-consuming and error-prone task. However the efforts made to model these processes are seldom reused beyond their original purpose. Reuse of business process models has the potential to overcome the challenges of modelling business processes from scratch. Process model repositories, properly populated, are certainly a step toward supporting reuse of process models. This thesis starts with the observation that the existing process model repositories for supporting process model reuse suffer from several shortcomings that affect their usability in practice. Firstly, most of the existing repositories are proprietary, therefore they can only be enhanced or extended with new models by the owners of the repositories. Secondly, it is difficult to locate and retrieve relevant process models from a large collection. Thirdly, process models are not goal related, thereby making it difficult to gain an understanding of the business goals that are realized by a certain model. Finally, process model repositories lack a clear mechanism to identify and define the relationship between business processes and as a result it is difficult to identify related processes. Following a design science research paradigm, this thesis proposes an open and language-independent process model repository with an efficient retrieval system to support process model reuse. The proposed repository is grounded on four original and interrelated contributions: (1) a set of requirements that a process model repository should possess to increase the probability of process model reuse; (2) a context-based process semantic annotation model for semantically annotating process models to facilitate effective retrieval of process models; (3) a business process relationship meta-model for identifying and defining the relationship of process models in the repository; and (4) architecture of a process model repository for process model reuse. The models and architecture produced in this thesis were evaluated to test their utility, quality and efficacy. The semantic annotation model was evaluated through two empirical studies using controlled experiments. The conclusion drawn from the two studies is that the annotation model improves searching, navigation and understanding of process models. The process relationship meta-model was evaluated using an informed argument to determine the extent to which it meets the established requirements. The results of the analysis revealed that the meta-model meets the established requirements. Also the analysis of the architecture against the requirements indicates that the architecture meets the established requirements. / Processhantering, också kallat ärendehantering, har blivit en av de viktigaste ansatserna för att utforma dagens organisationer och informationssystem. En central komponent i processhantering är processmodellering. Det är allmänt känt att modellering av processer kan vara en komplex, tidskrävande och felbenägen uppgift. Och de insatser som görs för att modellera processer kan sällan användas bortom processernas ursprungliga syfte. Återanvändning av processmodeller skulle kunna övervinna många av de utmaningar som finns med att modellera processer. En katalog över processmodeller är ett steg mot att stödja återanvändning av processmodeller. Denna avhandling börjar med observationen att befintliga processmodellkataloger för att stödja återanvändning av processmodeller lider av flera brister som påverkar deras användbarhet i praktiken. För det första är de flesta processmodellkatalogerna proprietära, och därför kan endast katalogägarna förbättra eller utöka dem med nya modeller. För det andra är det svårt att finna och hämta relevanta processmodeller från en stor katalog. För det tredje är processmodeller inte målrelaterade, vilket gör det svårt att få en förståelse för de affärsmål som realiseras av en viss modell. Slutligen så saknar processmodellkataloger ofta en tydlig mekanism för att identifiera och definiera förhållandet mellan processer, och därför är det svårt att identifiera relaterade processer. Utifrån ett designvetenskapligt forskningsparadigm så föreslår denna avhandling en öppen och språkoberoende processmodellkatalog med ett effektivt söksystem för att stödja återanvändning av processmodeller. Den föreslagna katalogen bygger på fyra originella och inbördes relaterade bidrag: (1) en uppsättning krav som en processmodellkatalog bejöver uppfylla för att öka möjligheterna till återanvändning av processmodeller; (2) en kontextbaserad semantisk processannoteringsmodell för semantisk annotering av processmodeller för att underlätta effektivt återvinnande av processmodeller; (3) en metamodell för processrelationer för att identifiera och definiera förhållandet mellan processmodeller i katalogen; och (4) en arkitektur av en processmodellkatalog för återanvändning av processmodeller. De modeller och den arkitektur som tagits fram i denna avhandling har utvärderats för att testa deras användbarhet, kvalitet och effektivitet. Den semantiska annotationsmodellen utvärderades genom två empiriska studier med kontrollerade experiment. Slutsatsen av de två studierna är att modellen förbättrar sökning, navigering och förståelse för processmodeller. Metamodellen för processrelationer utvärderades med hjälp av ett informerat argument för att avgöra i vilken utsträckning den uppfyllde de ställda kraven. Resultaten av analysen visade att metamodellen uppfyllde dessa krav. Även analysen av arkitekturen indikerade att denna uppfyllde de fastställda kraven.

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Service-oriented architectures (SOA), and in particular Web services, have quickly become a popular paradigm to develop distributed applications. Nowadays, more and more organizations shift their core business to the Web services platform within which various interactions between the autonomous services occur. One of the widely accepted standards in the Web services platform is Business Process Execution Lan- guage for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). BPEL defines a language to integrate Web services by creating composite Web services in the form of business processes following the service orchestration paradigm, and it enables organizations to focus on core competence and mission-critical operations while outsource every- thing else to reduce costs and time to market. However BPEL is deficient in privacy issues. The facts are: (1) service requestors?? personal information is fundamental to enable business processes (e.g., the mortgage approval business process); (2) privacy concerns have become one of the most important issues in Information Technology and has received increasing at- tention from organizations, consumers and legislators; (3) most organizations have recognized that dealing correctly and honestly with customers?? privacy concerns can have beneficial returns for their businesses, not only in terms of being compliant with laws and regulations but also in terms of reputation and potential business op- portunities. If not addressed properly, privacy concerns may become an impediment to the widespread adoption of BPEL. Privacy issues have many aspects, the privacy concerns of potential service re- questor (i.e., client) and the privacy concerns of service provider (i.e., organization) are two of them. Service requestor specifies his/her privacy concerns as privacy preference, while service provider defines and publishes its privacy policy to specify its privacy promises. Before requestor accesses certain service, he/she likes to know whether the service provider will respect his/her privacy preference. Otherwise, the requestor may seek the desired service from somewhere else. On the other hand,even though most organizations publish their privacy promises, it will be more convincing if customers are assured that such privacy promises are actually kept within the organizations. In this thesis, we propose a privacy enforcement framework for business processes. In particular, we focus on those that are automated using BPEL. The framework consists of two parts. One focuses on the service requestors?? perspective of privacy, the other concentrates on the privacy concerns of the business process owner (i.e., the service provider). More specifically, the first part of the framework is based on description logic, and allows to represent privacy concepts and perform some rea- soning about these concepts. The reasoning engine will check requestor??s privacy preference against the service provider??s published privacy promises before the re- questor accesses the desired service. The second part of the framework facilitates the service provider to enforce its privacy policy within all its business processes throughout the life cycle of personal data. The privacy enforcement can be achieved step by step: privacy inspection, privacy verification and privacy obligation man- agement. The first step, privacy inspection, aims to identify which activity needs the involvement of what personal data. The second step, privacy verification, is to verify the correctness of designed BPEL business processes in terms of privacy. The third step is to enforce the privacy by managing the fulfillment of the obligation during the execution of business process. The privacy enforcement framework presented in the thesis has been implemented. The first part of the framework is implemented in the Privacy Match Engine prototype. For the second part of the framework, as different parts of the privacy policy need to be enforced at different stages of the life cycle of business processes, the implementation consists of a privacy verification tool and a privacy obligation management system.

No description available.

No description available.

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), and in particular Web services, have quickly become a popular paradigm to develop distributed applications. Nowadays, more and more organizations shift their core business to the Web services platform within which various interactions between the autonomous services occur. One of the widely accepted standards in the Web services platform is Business Process Execution Lan- guage for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). BPEL defines a language to integrate Web services by creating composite Web services in the form of business processes following the service orchestration paradigm, and it enables organizations to focus on core competence and mission-critical operations while outsource every- thing else to reduce costs and time to market. However BPEL is deficient in privacy issues. The facts are: (1) service requestors?? personal information is fundamental to enable business processes (e.g., the mortgage approval business process); (2) privacy concerns have become one of the most important issues in Information Technology and has received increasing at- tention from organizations, consumers and legislators; (3) most organizations have recognized that dealing correctly and honestly with customers?? privacy concerns can have beneficial returns for their businesses, not only in terms of being compliant with laws and regulations but also in terms of reputation and potential business op- portunities. If not addressed properly, privacy concerns may become an impediment to the widespread adoption of BPEL. Privacy issues have many aspects, the privacy concerns of potential service re- questor (i.e., client) and the privacy concerns of service provider (i.e., organization) are two of them. Service requestor specifies his/her privacy concerns as privacy preference, while service provider defines and publishes its privacy policy to specify its privacy promises. Before requestor accesses certain service, he/she likes to know whether the service provider will respect his/her privacy preference. Otherwise, the requestor may seek the desired service from somewhere else. On the other hand,even though most organizations publish their privacy promises, it will be more convincing if customers are assured that such privacy promises are actually kept within the organizations. In this thesis, we propose a privacy enforcement framework for business processes. In particular, we focus on those that are automated using BPEL. The framework consists of two parts. One focuses on the service requestors?? perspective of privacy, the other concentrates on the privacy concerns of the business process owner (i.e., the service provider). More specifically, the first part of the framework is based on description logic, and allows to represent privacy concepts and perform some rea- soning about these concepts. The reasoning engine will check requestor??s privacy preference against the service provider??s published privacy promises before the re- questor accesses the desired service. The second part of the framework facilitates the service provider to enforce its privacy policy within all its business processes throughout the life cycle of personal data. The privacy enforcement can be achieved step by step: privacy inspection, privacy verification and privacy obligation man- agement. The first step, privacy inspection, aims to identify which activity needs the involvement of what personal data. The second step, privacy verification, is to verify the correctness of designed BPEL business processes in terms of privacy. The third step is to enforce the privacy by managing the fulfillment of the obligation during the execution of business process. The privacy enforcement framework presented in the thesis has been implemented. The first part of the framework is implemented in the Privacy Match Engine prototype. For the second part of the framework, as different parts of the privacy policy need to be enforced at different stages of the life cycle of business processes, the implementation consists of a privacy verification tool and a privacy obligation management system.

Business Process (BP) design reflects managerial needs and may directly influence business performance. A good design could substantially increase managerial performance, while a bad one would be inefficient, lack of flexibility, mess cost effective and eventually miss the business strategy. The widespread of information technology has raised the need to redesign or modify business processes in order to fit the trend of automation and computerization. As a result, business process reengineering (BPR) has gained much attention in 1990s. In recent years, a new paradigm, called Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), becomes a new management innovation. Service process design becomes a new science that can be applied to support service innovation and management. Previous research on BPR includes two major directions: one focuses on managerial aspects of business processes, including the planning, implementation, and critical factors of BPR; the other focuses on the design aspects pf business processes with a target of making processes more efficient. For research on process design, most deal with the syntactic structure of the process. They analyze the syntax structure of a process. This can help find design errors such as deadlocks, livelocks, and even infinite loops in a process. Not many studies have investigated whether a process design meets its managerial goals. This research presents a knowledge-based approach to dealing with the managerial issue of whether a process design matches specific managerial goals. This thesis contains a new business process modeling method that allows a business process to be diagnosed by knowledge-based rules. We have defined three managerial goals in process design: effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. Each activity in a business process has its goal. Through the analysis of activities and their associated goals, we can determine whether a business process is properly designed. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, we have implemented a JAVA-based prototype expert system and used it to check two sample business processes. The contributions of the study are two-fold. Academically, it proposed a new approach for business process diagnosis, which can help determine whether a process meets its managerial goal. In practice, businesses can use the concepts developed in the thesis to make their business processes more effective by matching activities with intended managerial goals.

Based on permanently operation faiths of enterprise and faced to the strike against recycle of economical prosperity, variation of society and information technology, the main purpose of this case study is to discuss how enterprise will be transform and the relationship between Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and Information Technology (IT). The object of this case study is Air Asia Company Limited (AACL) which is a 60-years enterprise and goes through verities managements by Arm Forces of USA, American operational company and Taiwanese operational company. This case study goes deep into understand industrial characteristic of AACL and influences from the trend of world economies and development polices of government in first step. Furthermore, this case study will discuss AACL¡¦s development background, company culture and problems of currently business operations and management, expecting by using BPR and IT to bring the transform opportunities for the subject enterprise. The main basement of this case study is mode of¡uThe 5 levels of Business Transformation enabled by Information Technology¡vwhich was raised by Venkatraman in 1995. Writer using the above mentioned mode to examine the Information Technology (IT) plays what kind of rules, the ranges and ways of influences during the development processes of the subject company. However, ¡§People¡¨ is main key elements to the success for leading the results of the above mentioned.