Submitted by Pedro Henrique Rodrigues (pedro.henriquer@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-05T17:19:23Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação George Augusto Valença Santos _ CIn UFPE _ Bussiness Process Variability - A Systematic Literature Review.pdf: 5890061 bytes, checksum: 6ff1f1ce8ef59a0eab2536ed6f50659a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T17:19:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação George Augusto Valença Santos _ CIn UFPE _ Bussiness Process Variability - A Systematic Literature Review.pdf: 5890061 bytes, checksum: 6ff1f1ce8ef59a0eab2536ed6f50659a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03 / Business processes have facilitated and enhanced management activities, being considered an instrument capable of approximating the strategic guidance and the people who execute their work to achieve organizational goals. In this scenario, continuous evaluation procedures, compliance with government regulations and industry standards, evolutions in the business domain, stakeholders’ needs, new technologies and economic factors related to globalization pressure are examples of aspects that can foster changes on business processes. The impact of this changing environment is the variation of business processes, in a phenomenon called business process variability. The objective of this research is, therefore, to aggregate relevant studies which address the context of this phenomenon. The studies’ selection was accomplished through a Systematic Literature Review, conducting automatic searches in a set of digital libraries and manual searches in leading conferences and journals in the fields of Business Process Management and Computer Science. In total, 13619 studies were retrieved, from which 80 were classified as relevant. This set of primary studies acted as sources of evidence for answering 3 research questions and their respectively subquestions. From the analysis performed, the study concludes that despite efforts in the literature for managing business process variability, this concept is not clear and well delimited, involving additional aspects and, hence, lacking a structured taxonomy. Contributions of the current work are: to provide valuable information with respect to the main notions in business process variability field and, possible types and inductors of process variability;to identify the main challenges faced by organizations when dealing with this phenomenon and; to examine a set of proposals for process variability management, investigating the existence of tool support and empirical evaluations carried out.

The evolution of services oriented architecture and the centralization of services enable the expansion of business process management tools. The centralized solution for BPM brings more flexibility, and it also helps to build high-quality architecture. Currently there exist several solutions that support the BPM, and the selection of the proper tool can be difficult. Simultaneously, it is a rapidly growing industry which also brings several standards and principals. The main goal of my thesis is to help IT and business specialist with the selection and application of BPM into enterprise architecture.

Many large business processes are inherently distributed, spanning multiple organizations, administrative domains, and geographic locations. To support such applications, this thesis develops a flexible and distributed platform to develop, execute, and monitor business processes. The solutions utilize a distributed content-based publish/subscribe overlay that is extended with support for mobile clients and client interest churn. Over this layer, a distributed execution engine uses events to coordinate the execution of the process, and dynamically redeploys activities in the process in order to minimize a user-specified cost function and preserve service level agreements (SLAs). Finally, a management layer allows users to find and automatically compose services available across a distributed set of service registries, and monitor processes for SLA violations. Evaluations show that the distributed execution engine can scale better than alternate architectures, exhibiting over 60% improvements in execution time in one experiment. As well the system can dynamically redeploy processes to reflect changing workload conditions and SLAs, saving up to 90% of the process messaging overhead of a static deployment.

Many large business processes are inherently distributed, spanning multiple organizations, administrative domains, and geographic locations. To support such applications, this thesis develops a flexible and distributed platform to develop, execute, and monitor business processes. The solutions utilize a distributed content-based publish/subscribe overlay that is extended with support for mobile clients and client interest churn. Over this layer, a distributed execution engine uses events to coordinate the execution of the process, and dynamically redeploys activities in the process in order to minimize a user-specified cost function and preserve service level agreements (SLAs). Finally, a management layer allows users to find and automatically compose services available across a distributed set of service registries, and monitor processes for SLA violations. Evaluations show that the distributed execution engine can scale better than alternate architectures, exhibiting over 60% improvements in execution time in one experiment. As well the system can dynamically redeploy processes to reflect changing workload conditions and SLAs, saving up to 90% of the process messaging overhead of a static deployment.

Knowledge transfer is a complex exercise in the business process reengineering (BPR) context. To explore what affects the effectiveness of knowledge transfer, the A-company was chosen for this study which had undergone the BPR implementation with the help of two well-known consultant firms. We adopted five-phase knowledge transfer method and followed the case study method to investigate what activities were performed when the A-company implemented BPR, how consultants interacted with the A-company in these activities in order to transferring knowledge, and what knowledge was transferred during each BPR step. Finally we induct three factors that may affect the effectiveness of knowledge transfer among the stakeholders, i.e., knowledge representation, interaction, and consulting service. We also identify two types of knowledge may be transferred during each BPR step. These findings provide insight for organizations when they implement BPR.

The most challenge encountered by organization is efficient management reengineering, to avoid the crisis due to less of initiative, the ability to change the company. The management on organization reengineering includes organization adjust to the demand from variable environment and practical actions to reengineer the people is the organization. In other words, introduce the new concepts, new technology into the organization resulting in new structure and new behaviors. The conclusions from my research on organization reengineering are summarized as the following: 1. To continuously reengineer the organization, not only the operation on process need to be changed but also the working attitude of employees need to be changed, that is, before change the process, people need to be changed, that is before change the process, people need to be reengineered first. 2. The single plan on process reengineering, absolutely can¡¦t charge people performance and behaviors, but only with multiple plans to introduce to every level of process, the result can be obtained. 3. The strategy to success on business on business process reengineering a. The determination and strong leadership to build on excellent management team. b. Clearly recognize the change of business, create the vision, and reengineer the business process. c. Emphasize the reengineering on the interfere between business and environment, to build a working environment which empowers to the employees to take full responsibility. d. Restructure Company culture, strengthen new management and build strong competitive ability. 4. There is no single answer on whether business process reengineering should be from top to down with strong activity or should be gradually step by step. It depends on the pressure of company restructure, the expectation from top management, and consideration of the reality. Keyword: Business Process Reengineering, Organizational Change

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Zugl.: Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 2008

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / South African Economic Development strategy has in the previous 15 years, and even leading back as far as the late 1950s, followed the bias of conventional modernisation theory which traditionally equates economic development, and associated job creation, with industrialisation. However, in the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGI-SA), the South African government’s most recent Economic Development Strategy document, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Tourism, both Service sectors, have been put forward as the priority sector development areas. This mini-thesis outlines the factors and evolving economic development theories, both global and national, which have contributed to this shift in strategy. This study pays detailed attention to the BPO sector by reviewing and establishing its capacity and potential to meaningfully contribute to economic growth and accelerated job creation, globally and, specifically in South Africa, in reference to the South African government’s stated development objectives. ‘Exportable’ Services, and specifically the BPO sector, has only in recent years shown its potential as a significant contributor to economic development, and South Africa and other developing nations have little precedent and few guidelines as to how best develop the sector to achieve accelerated economic growth and job creation, thus, this study goes further by outlining possible strategic development issues for successful development of the BPO sector in South Africa. The underlying message of this thesis is that there is a case for development strategists and planners to continue to investigate, pursue and prioritise the development of ‘exportable’ service sectors.

Business Process Management (BPM) has become one of the management approaches adopted by many organisations that strive to survive in a turbulent and competitive environment. BPM offers the means to manage and optimize business processes with the objective of improved efficiency and effectiveness; thereby improving the potential of business success. However, the extent to which BPM influences business success is a matter of debate with diverse schools of thought finding it difficult to reach consensus regarding the critical success factors of BPM and the extent at which processes and people influence business success. The capability of an organisation or enterprise is the ability to deliver on a desired outcome. In this dissertation, the enterprise capabilities of BPM are investigated. The research sets out to investigate the BPM maturity level of a South African parastatal. The intention is to identify and improve on those factors that influence maturity of the enterprise capabilities and may have negative impact on stakeholders. The approach taken to address the research objectives drew on case study methodology. Fieldwork was conducted using company documents, observation, a questionnaire and in-depth interviews. The questionnaire responses were qualitatively analysed using the categories of Hammer's model of enterprise capability. The research findings identified weaknesses in all categories of enterprise capability though expertise appeared to be thriving. The findings further suggest that weaknesses in leadership and the leadership style in particular impact on the effectiveness of business processes. The leadership style was seen as the major driver to impede process effectiveness. The following themes describing leadership style were derived from interviews: creation of sense of belonging, degree of approachability and extent of collaboration. In order to improve the BPM in the case company, the following recommendations were made: communication sessions, awareness training and process remodelling. The research study also provides the opportunity to understand BPM in a broader context, thus having potential for transferability to other organisations.