Knowledge and knowledge work are key factors of today’s successful companies. This study devises an approach for increasing the performance of knowledge work by shifting it towards a process orientation. Business process management and workflow management are methods for structured and predefined work but are not flexible enough to support knowledge work in a comprehensive way. Case-based reasoning (CBR) uses the knowledge of previously experienced cases in order to propose a solution to a problem. CBR can be used to retrieve, reuse, revise, retain and store functional and process knowledge. The aim of the research was to develop an approach that combines CBR and process execution to improve knowledge work. The research goals are: a casedescription for knowledge work that can be integrated into a process execution system and that contains both functional and process knowledge; a similarity algorithm for the retrieval of functional and procedural knowledge; and an adaptation mechanism that deals with the different granularities of solution parts. This thesis contains a profound literature framework and follows a design science research (DSR) strategy. During the awareness phase of the design science research process, an application scenario was acquired using the case study research method, which is the admission process for a study programme at a university. This application scenario is used to introduce and showcase the combined CBR and process execution approach called ICEBERG-PE, which consists of a case model and CBR services. The approach is implemented as a prototype and can be instantiated using the ICEBERG-PE procedure model, a specific procedure model for ontology-based, CBR projects. The ICEBERG-PE prototype has been evaluated using triangulated evaluation data and different evaluation settings to confirm that the approach is transferable to other contexts. Finally, this thesis concludes with potential recommendations for future research. / Computing / D. Phil. (Information Systems)

This study explores complexity metrics for business artifact process models described by Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN). Process models are usually described using Business Process Management (BPM), which is a relatively mature discipline with a large number of practitioners. Over the last few decades a new way of describing data intensive business processes has emerged in BPM literature, for which traditional BPM is no longer adequate. This emerging method, used to describe more flexible processes, is called business artifacts with Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM). The work on GSM influenced CMMN, which was created to fill a market need for more flexible case management processes for knowledge workers. Complexity metrics have been developed for traditional BPM models, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). However, traditional BPM is not suitable for describing GSM or CMMN process models. Therefore, complexity metrics developed for traditional process models may not be applicable to business artifact process models such as CMMN. This study addresses this gap by exploring complexity metrics for business artifact process models using CMMN. The findings of this study have practical implications for the CMMN standard and for the commercial products implementing CMMN. This research makes the following contributions: • The development of a formal description of CMMN using first-order logic. • An exploration of the relationship between CMMN and GSM and the development of transformation procedures between them. • A comparison between the method complexity of CMMN and other popular process methods, including BPMN, Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity diagrams, and Event-driven Process Charts (EPC). • The creation of a systematic literature review of complexity metrics for process models, which was conducted in order to inform the creation of CMMN metrics. • The identification of a set of complexity metrics for the CMMN standard, which underwent theoretical and empirical validation. This research advances literature in the areas of method complexity, complexity metrics for process models, declarative processes, and research on CMMN by characterizing CMMN method complexity, identifying complexity metrics for CMMN, and exploring the relationship between CMMN and GSM. / Ph.D. (Computer Science)

Submitted by Nayara Passos (nayara.passos@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-11T18:45:54Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) TESE César Augusto Lins de Oliveira.pdf: 3834643 bytes, checksum: d06a43bd091b3a1741f646e42716d74b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-11T18:45:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) TESE César Augusto Lins de Oliveira.pdf: 3834643 bytes, checksum: d06a43bd091b3a1741f646e42716d74b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / CNPq / Nas últimas duas décadas, a literatura em gestão empresarial tem demonstrado um interesse crescente no tema da incerteza e os meios utilizados pelas organizações para lidar com ela. Há um consenso entre os pesquisadores atualmente de que as organizações precisam estar constantemente mudando e adaptando as suas operações e estratégias para atender a novos requisitos econômicos e de mercado. A capacidade de uma empresa de mudar rapidamente as suas metas e estratégias e de reconfigurar rapidamente as suas operações é chamada de “flexibilidade estratégica”. Essa capacidade tem sido identificada como um fator crítico para o sucesso das organizações de hoje. Contudo, o apoio da tecnologia da informação à flexibilidade estratégica tem sido limitado. Na maioria das organizações, há ainda uma grande lacuna que separa as atividades de planejamento estratégico das atividades de desenvolvimento de sistemas. Isso reduz a agilidade da companhia em responder a novas necessidades do mercado. Um estudo da literatura em gestão mostra que as necessidades atuais de gerentes em ambientes incertos e mutáveis não tem sido satisfeitas pelos sistemas de apoio à gestão disponíveis hoje. Nesta tese, nós propomos um mecanismo para tornar sistemas da informação “conscientes da estratégia”. Essa consciência estratégica é definida como uma funcionalidade que permite a atualização rápida das funções do sistema em resposta a mudanças estratégicas. Essa funcionalidade também aumenta a capacidade de alinhamento estratégico e monitoramento de desempenho da organização. Mais especificamente, nós propomos uma arquitetura de software que permite que os usuários de um sistema se tornem mais conscientes das necessidades estratégicas da companhia durante a realização do seu trabalho. Nosso foco nesse trabalho é na gestão de processos de negócio e o conceito que nós desenvolvemos é chamado de Gestão de Processos de Negócio Consciente de Estratégia (Strategy-Aware Business Process Management - SA-BPM). A consciência estratégica é obtida por meio de uma infraestrutura modular que muda o comportamento do sistema de gestão de processos em tempo real. O sistema passa a ser capaz de capturar informações derivadas diretamente dos sistemas de apoio à decisão da organização (ex.: sistema de planejamento estratégico). Por meio desse instrumento, as organizações podem desenvolver a capacidade de realizar mudanças frequentes nas suas estratégias e de tornar essas mudanças operacionais de maneira rápida, contribuindo assim para a sua flexibilidade estratégica. / Over the past two decades, management research has demonstrated a growing interest in the subject of uncertainty and in the means employed by organizations to cope with it. There is a consensus among researchers nowadays that organizations must be constantly changing and adapting their operations and strategies to match new market and economic requirements. The ability of a firm to rapidly change its goals and strategies and to readily reconfigure its operations is called “strategic flexibility”. Such ability is being identified as a critical success factor for contemporary organizations. Nevertheless, information technology support for strategic flexibility has been limited. In most organizations, there is still a large gap that separates strategic planning activities from information systems development activities. This reduces the agility of the company to respond to new market necessities. A study of the management literature demonstrates that current requirements of managers in uncertain and changing environments have not been fulfilled by the management support systems available today. In this thesis, we propose a mechanism to make information systems “strategy-aware”. Such strategy awareness is defined as a feature that allows for the rapid update of a system’s functions in response to strategic changes. This feature also improves an organization’s capacity for strategic alignment and performance monitoring. More specifically, we propose a software architecture that makes information system’s users become aware of the company’s strategic necessities while performing their job. Our focus in this work is on business process management and the concept developed by us is called Strategy-Aware Business Process Management (SA-BPM). The strategy awareness is achieved through a modular adaptation infrastructure that changes the behavior of the business process management system at run-time. The system becomes able to capture information derived directly from the organization’s management support systems (e.g., its strategic planning systems). Through our framework, organizations can develop the capacity to make frequent changes to their strategies and to rapidly make these changes operational, contributing to the improvement of their strategic flexibility.

Organizations are increasingly aware of the importance of defining and managing their processes. That is why the Business Process Management (BPM) has evolved over the last few years. Concepts such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) help in the approximation between business and technology make easier communicating and understanding the real business needs. In addition, the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm promotes model-based software creation, which aims to increase developing platform-independent solutions productivity with lower implementation costs. In this context, this work presents BPM4Services, a model driven framework for the processes automation based on a Service Oriented Architecture. The framework intends to guide the development of solutions oriented to efficient and standardized processes, integrating concepts of BPM, SOA and MDE. An analysis of the BPM4Services, through an example, was performed in a Neonatal Screening process at the Hospital Universitário at Universidade Federal de Sergipe, demonstrating the use and viability of the framework. / Organizações estão cada vez mais conscientes da importância da definição e gerenciamento de seus processos, dessa forma, a Gestão de Processos de Negócio (Business Process Management - BPM) tem evoluído ao longo dos últimos anos. Conceitos como Arquiteturas Orientadas a Serviços (Service Oriented Architecure - SOA) auxiliam na aproximação entre negócio e tecnologia, facilitando a comunicação e entendimento das reais necessidades do negócio. Adicionalmente, o paradigma Model Driven Engineering (MDE) promove a criação de softwares baseados em modelos, o qual visa aumentar a produtividade no desenvolvimento de soluções independentes de plataformas e com um menor custo de implementação. Nesse contexto, este trabalho apresenta o BPM4Services, um framework dirigido a modelos para automação de processos de negócio baseado em uma Arquitetura Orientada a Serviços. O framework tem como objetivo direcionar o desenvolvimento de soluções orientadas a processos de forma eficiente e padronizada, integrando os conceitos de BPM, SOA e MDE. Uma análise do BPM4Services, através de um caso exemplo, foi realizada no processo de Triagem Neonatal no Hospital Universitário da Universidade Federal de Sergipe, demonstrando a utilização e viabilidade do framework.

Submitted by Rafael Santana (rafael.silvasantana@ufpe.br) on 2017-08-30T18:08:16Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Dissertação_UM MODELO DE ESCRITÓRIO UNIFICADO DE PROJETOS E PROCESSOS_Caio_McIntyre.pdf: 6348725 bytes, checksum: fdf9ecef0d296e1cd7a6050411db2fdf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-08-30T18:08:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Dissertação_UM MODELO DE ESCRITÓRIO UNIFICADO DE PROJETOS E PROCESSOS_Caio_McIntyre.pdf: 6348725 bytes, checksum: fdf9ecef0d296e1cd7a6050411db2fdf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-08-26 / FACEPE / O crescimento das iniciativas de gestão de projetos e de processos de negócio nas organizações tem deixado cada vez mais evidente o importante papel que essas disciplinas exercem no auxílio da condução das estratégias organizacionais. Tanto os escritórios de gestão de projetos (do inglês, Project Management Office ou PMO) quanto os escritórios de gestão de processos de negócio (Business Process Management Office ou BPMO) deixaram de ser somente guardiões dessas competências e se tornaram verdadeiros agentes de execução da estratégia, norteando a organização rumo aos seus objetivos estratégicos. Neste cenário, em que os dois escritórios deveriam trabalhar de forma coesa em prol da estratégia, é frequente que tenham discordâncias, duplicações de funções e prioridades conflitantes. Com o objetivo de criar uma maior sinergia entre a gestão de duas competências que são consideradas veículos da execução da estratégia organizacional, este trabalho propõe um modelo de implantação e atuação para escritórios unificados de projetos e processos. Para formular este modelo foram feitas revisões de literatura, proposto seis elementos para análise de escritórios e em seguida foram feitas análises comparativas de modelos de escritórios de projetos, modelos de escritórios de processos e das sinergias conhecidas entre os dois escritórios. Os seis elementos de análise foram passos necessários para estruturação, objetivos do escritório, posicionamento estratégico, local de inserção na estrutura organizacional, atividades desempenhadas e papéis e responsabilidades. O modelo unificado foi então proposto com diretrizes baseadas nos seis elementos e com uma estratégia de implementação do modelo que detalha os doze passos necessários divididos em quatro fases. Trata-se de um modelo adaptável, cuja aplicação deve ser feita de acordo com a realidade de cada organização. O modelo foi posteriormente submetido a um survey de validação com especialistas. Além de mostrar alguns pontos de melhoria, o resultado da validação serviu para ratificar a aderência do modelo de escritórios unificados de projetos e processos aos conceitos das duas disciplinas, sob os aspectos de utilidade e aplicabilidade do modelo. Palavras-chave: Escritório de Gestão de Projetos e Processos. Escritório de Projetos. Escritório de Processos de negócio. Modelo unificado de escritório. Diretrizes de escritório de gestão. / The growth of project management and business process management initiatives in the organizations has been making it more evident that these two disciplines play crucial roles in the roll-out of organizational strategies. The PMOs (Project Management Offices) and BPMOs (Business Process Management Office) are no longer only playing the roles of guardians of these competencies but have become true agents of strategic execution leading the organizations towards their strategic goals. In this scenario in which both offices should work in a cohesive manner to benefit the strategy, it is frequent to see struggles because of disagreements, duplicated functions and conflicting priorities. With the objective of increasing synergy between the management of these two disciplines that are considered vehicles for the execution of the organizational strategy, this work proposes a model for a unified project and process management office. To formulate this proposal, literature reviews were conducted, six management office analysis elements proposed and comparative analysis of project management office models, business process management office models and known synergies between both offices made. The six management office analysis elements were steps to implement a management office, office objectives, strategic positioning, insertion site in the organizational structure, activities and roles and responsibilities. The unified model was then proposed with its guidelines based on the six elements and an implementation strategy that outlines the twelve necessary steps divided in four phases. This model is an adaptable one and its implementation should be adapted according to the reality of each organization. The model was then submitted to a validation survey answered by specialists. The validation served its purpose by showing possible points of improvement and by ratifying its adherence to the concepts of both disciplines, its utility and its applicability. Keywords: Project and Process Management Office. Project Management Office. Business Process Management Office. Integrated Office Model. Management Office Guidelines.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T14:57:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Mestrado Luiz Loja.pdf: 2304806 bytes, checksum: 345f8fb0018e00778e9d22ef4a49b0e2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-10 / To offer products and services, organizations need to execute business processes. The effectiveness of these processes is critical to the success of any organization. For this reason, there have been major efforts to develop techniques and tools aimed at the improvement of business processes. One of the results of these efforts are the BPMS ( textit Business Process Management Systems), software that help to define, analyze, and manage business processes. Although there are many BPMS available, current systems only provide support for running a limited set of processes. Notably, BPMS do not allow the execution of flexible processes, restricting its operations to defined processes. In addition, they do not provide a collaborative environment for process modeling. This paper presents a software architecture for management of business processes that overcomes these limitations of current BPMS. The architecture was used to implement a software tool called Sinfonia which includes a metamodel for business processes, a process execution engine and a graphical process modeler. The innovative aspects of the proposals of this work include features such as support for defining and implementing flexible processes, such as empirical and textit adhoc processes, and support for modeling collaborative processes. Sinfonia has enough expressive power to define and implement key business process standards described in the literature. The ability of this tool to express flexible processes and to promote collaboration in the modeling of business processes were evaluated in an experiment involving fourteen participants. The results of this experiment provide evidence that Sinfonia contributes to the evolution of BPMS. / Para realizar serviços e produtos, as organizações precisam executar processos de negócio. A efetividade destes processos é um fator crítico para o sucesso de qualquer organização. Por essa razão, tem havido grandes esforços para o desenvolvimento de técnicas e ferramentas dirigidas para a melhoria de processos de negócio. Um dos resultados produzidos por esses esforços são os BPMS (Business Process Management Systems), softwares que auxiliam a definição, análise, e gerenciamento de processos de negócio. Embora existam diversos BPMS disponíveis, os sistemas atuais apenas provêem suporte à execução de um conjunto limitado de processos. Notadamente os BPMS não permitem a execução de processos flexíveis, restringindo sua atuação aos processos definidos. Além disso, eles não proporcionam um ambiente colaborativo de modelagem de processos. Este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura de software para gerência de processos de negócio que supera essas limitações dos BPMS atuais. A arquitetura foi empregada para a implementação de uma ferramenta de software denominada Sinfonia, que contempla um metamodelo de processos de negócio, uma máquina de execução de processos e um modelador gráfico de processos. Os aspectos inovadores das propostas do presente trabalho abrangem características como o suporte à definição e execução de processos flexíveis, tais como processos empíricos e ad hoc, e o apoio à modelagem colaborativa de processos. A ferramenta Sinfonia tem poder de expressão suficiente para definir e executar os principais padrões de processos de negócio descritos na literatura. A capacidade dessa ferramenta de expressar processos flexíveis e de promover a colaboração na modelagem de processos de negócio foram avaliadas em um experimento envolvendo quatorze participantes. Os resultados desse experimento provêem evidências de que Sinfonia contribui para a evolução dos BPMS.

Dynamic changes in the business environment requires their business process to be up-to-date. The Workflow Management Systems supporting these business processes need to adapt to these changes rapidly. The Work Flow Management Systems however lacks the ability to dynamically propagate the process changes to their process model schemas (Workflow templates). The literature on workflow schema evolution emphasizes the impact of changes in control flow with very ittle attention to other aspects of a workflow schema. This thesis studies the data aspect (data flow and data model) of workflow schema during its evolution. Workflow schema changes can lead to inconsistencies between the underlying database model and the workflow. A rather straight forward approach to the problem would be to abandon the existing database model and start afresh. However this introduces data persistence issues. Also there could be significant system downtimes involved in the process of migrating data from the old database model to the current one. In this research we develop an approach to address this problem. The business changes demand various types of control flow changes to its business process model (workflow schema). The control flow changes include task insertion, deletion, swapping, movement, replacement, extraction, in-lining, Parallelizing etc. Many of the control flow changes to the workflow can be made by using the combination of a simple task insertion and deletion, while some like embedding task in loop/ conditional branch and Parallelizing tasks also requires the addition/removal of control dependency between the tasks. Since many of the control flow change patterns involves task insertion and deletion at its core, in this thesis we study its impact on the underlying data model. We propose algorithms to dynamically handle the changes in the underlying relational database schema. First we identify the basic change patterns that can be implemented using atomic task insertion and deletions. Then we characterize these basic pattern in terms of their data flow anomalies (Missing, Redundant, Conflicting data) that they can generate. The Data schema compliance criteria are developed to identify the data changes: (i) that makes the underlying database schema inconsistent with the modified workflow and (ii) generating the aforementioned data anomalies. The Data schema compliance criteria characterizes the change patterns in terms of its ability to work with the current relational data model. The Data schema compliance criteria show various properties required of the modified workflow to be consistent with the underlying database model. The data of any workflow instance conforming to Data schema compliance criteria can be directly accommodated in the database model. The data anomalies (of task insertion and deletion) identified using DSC are handled dynamically using respective Data adaptation algorithms. The algorithm uses the functional dependency constraints in the relational database model to adapt/handle these data anomalies. Such handled data (changes) that conform to DSC can be directly accommodated in the underlying database schema. Hence with this approach the workflow can be modified (using task insertion and deletion) and their data changes can be implemented on-the-fly using the Data adaptation algorithms. In this research the same old data model is evolved without abandoning it even after the modification of the workflow schema. This maintains the old data persistence in the existing database schema. Detailed implementation procedures to deploy the Data adaptation algorithms are presented with illustrative examples.

Care process monitoring is important in healthcare domains to provide precise and detailed analytics on patients, providers, and resources participating in a care process and their status. These analytics are used to keep track of whether the quality of care goals set by healthcare organizations are satisfied and ensure that legislative and organizational guidelines are followed. The complexity of care process monitoring can vary depending on whether the care process takes place in a hospital or out in the community, and it can vary depending on the complexity of the information technology infrastructure that is in place to support the care process. A Care Process Monitoring Application (CPMA) is a software application which collects and integrates data from various sources while a care process is being provided, in order to provide performance reporting of metrics that are used to measure how well the performance goals and guidelines for the care process are being met. In our research, we have studied how CPMAs are built in order to improve the quality of their engineering. The significant challenge in this context is how to engineer a CPMA so that the engineering process is repeatable, produces a CPMA of consistent high quality, and requires less time, less effort and less complexity. This thesis proposes an application framework for care process monitoring that collects and integrates events from event sources, maintains the individual and aggregate states of the care process and populates a metrics data mart to support performance reporting. Our contributions are the following: a state-based application meta-model of care process monitoring, a care process monitoring architectural pattern, and finally, a behavior driven development methodology for CPMAs based on our meta-model and architectural pattern. Our results are validated through three different case studies in which we collaborated with two different health care organizations to build and deploy CPMAs for two different care processes (one hospital-based, the other community-based) in collaboration with healthcare clinicians and researchers.

Diploma thesis oriented on processes and business process management (BPM) is tightly related to the ability of organizations to adapt to the reality of today's world, reality of continuous and accelerating change. The objective for theoretical part is to summarize main terms, approaches, methods and other information about business process management, reasons for its evolution, business process modeling, execution by personal and other sources and its efficiency, process performance evaluation, to be able to use and apply them in commercial practice on the example of a small business company. Practical part includes results of theory application and knowledge acquired throughout studies application on the example of iFirma company. The thesis brings up process approaches application example in a business company and an intention to proof positive impact on its performance and continuous process improvement. What influence will IS/IT support of processes and process changes have? Several approaches to business management and even more applications bring up a need to evaluate and pick the right approach.

Diploma thesis is about business process reengineering (BPR) and its business processes in student organization ESN VSE Prague -- Buddy System. Main goal is business process reengineering and their support by information system BuddyIS, which helps to meet stu-dent's requirements. First chapter debates about processes theirs modelling and reengineer-ing. It discusses methodologies of BPR in general and then it chooses own methodology for this thesis. Next part is practical and starts with characteristic and analysis of student organization ESN VSE Prague -- Buddy System. It describes cultural environment, current status of IS/ICT and global process model. Global process model is core for next chapter, which identifies processes in organization and chooses those ones for reengineering. Those chosen processes are analysed more in detailed in detailed process diagram based on BPMN. Next part is considering process redesign based on awareness and understanding their workflow. According to redesign, proposed changes are implemented to information system BuddyIS based on principles of OpenUP. Last chapter analyses aftereffects caused by business process reengineering according to process audit made by M. Hammer (PEMM) and chosen factor measuring process performance. Fact that, chosen business processes are supported by information system BuddyIS is main benefit of this thesis.