A Common Body of Knowledge for BPM: A Call for Action

I’m currently doing some research towards the development of a Business Process Management Body of Knowledge (BPM BoK) so have been reading an interesting paper by Wasana Bandara, Michael Rosemann (QUT) and Paul Harmon (Business Process Trends) on the Process Knowledge Initiative website. Their paper discusses the need to advance BPM as a profession through the development of an empirically validated, accurate and relevant BoK and establish consensus on the definition of BPM. This exploratory paper identifies existing BPMBoK’s, proposes an approach for evaluation via an a-priori model and then offers an ontological design for BoK derivation. With a recognised gap between BPM education and the emerging capability demands of Industry, this BPMBoK will form the basis for both curriculum and practitioner development.

The Authors scan of the current BPM domain has identified five relevant BoK/certification programs deemed relevant to this study:
1. American Society of Quality (ASQ) Black Belt BoK
2. International Institute of Business Analysis BoK (BABOK)
3. OMG Business Process Standards
4. International Society for Performance Improvement BoK
5. Association of Business Process Management Professionals BoK (ABPMP BoK)

Due to its close alignment with the current intent of BPM, the Researchers have chosen to review the ABPMP BoK for this paper. Covering nine “knowledge areas”, the Bok is structured so that the core BOM concepts are presented in the first overarching knowledge group of Business Process Management:
1. Business Process Management
2. Process Modelling
3. Process Analysis
4. Process Design
5. Process Transformation
6. Process Performance Management
7. Process Organisation
8. Enterprise Process Management
9. BPM Technologies

Some of these knowledge areas pertain specifically to the core activities of a BPM practitioner, others to the organisational environment and the use of appropriate technology.

ABPMP BoK Evaluation Methodology
Following a review of the literature for BoK evaluation criteria, including Design Science research and input from the BPM community, an a-priori BoK evaluation framework was established covering the five identified factors of completeness; extendibility; understandability; application; and utility. The Authors then test the ABPMP BoK against each of these criteria and present their findings. Whilst acknowledging that the ABPMP BoK is a good start, “in its early phases and evolutionary”, there are apparent limitations with transparency, completeness and Industry consensus.

Design Approach for BoK Creation
The Researchers have broken down the content derivation process for a BPM BoK into two phases. The first is focused on what to include, the second on the actual population of the BoK components. As the focus of this paper is on phase 1, an ontology based approach is proposed to provide a unifying framework, supported by BPM practitioners, educators and Industry associations. Deemed an appropriate guide, due to the open and systematic approach taken by IIBA when developing their BABoK, the Authors have adopted the elements of Knowledge Areas, Tasks, and Techniques as appropriate for inclusion, with the addition of techniques & skills groups.

In summary, this initial paper calls for an open, BPM community driven effort to identify what it means to be a BPM professional. This is a long overdue initiative of benefit to the whole BPM community. Join the conversation here – Process Knowledge Initiative.

A critical analysis of global BPM demand

I’ve recently submitted a Business Process Management research paper for presentation at this year’s conference on Qualitative research in IT (QualIT2010), held immediately prior to the Australasian conference on Information Systems (ACIS2010) in Brisbane, Australia. Our paper provides insight into the research methodology applied and the outcomes of a global review of the capabilities organisations typically look for in their BPM employees.

To clearly articulate the preferred BPM capabilities sought across three distinct geographic regions, a structured content analysis of leading on-line recruitment websites was conducted, with this data compared to leading academic BPM capability frameworks. As there is still very little understanding on BPM as a profession, this research aims to address this gap by analysing current BPM vacancies on a global scale and providing a synthesised view of how the roles and responsibilities required aligns with known BPM capability frameworks.

The intent of this paper is to provide an understanding of how BPM practitioner capabilities currently required by organisations differ between the Australian, European and North American contexts. Specifically, this study addresses the following research questions through a literature review and qualitative data analysis:
• “What does the landscape of BPM employment opportunities look like across different geographic regions?”
• “How do sought after capabilities match to known BPM capability frameworks?”

This analysis can be used by prospective and current BPM professionals to understand organisational requirements globally, and academics to structure BPM education to suit these differing geographic demands. This study can be further extended to incorporate and align industry requirements with academic offerings to better serve the needs of the BPM community and make BPM curriculum more relevant.

I’ll put up a link to this paper and another on BPM curriculum (to be presented at ACIS2010) after the conferences.

Where Business Process Management & Social Technology meet

I recently authored a paper (soon to be published) focused on how organisations are currently undergoing a paradigm shift where existing Business Process Management (BPM) methodologies and organisational structures are being enhanced by emerging social technology applications such as wiki’s, blogs, micro-blogs and instant messaging.

Within organisations these applications are typically categorised as Enterprise 2.0. This movement is evidenced in the literature by Rito-Silva et al (2009) who discuss the view that business processes should not stifle human intervention, and social technology should be embedded within the modelling and execution phases of processes. They believe that this will support the bottom up design approach to model development and execution. This is a radical change from traditional Business Process Re-engineering and BPM approaches.

As outlined by Rito-Silva et al (2009), a key factor of emerging Business Process Management methodologies will be agility (Dreiling, 2009), and this issue can be supported by the application of social technologies. I’ll present these factors soon once this paper is released.

Future research: Organisational (collective) intelligence for process improvement (via BI).

Antonio Rito Silva, Rachid Meziani, Rodrigo Magalhaes, David Martinho, Ademar Aguiar and Nuno Flores (2009). AGILIPO: Embedding Social Software Features. Center for Organizational Design and Engineering – INOV, Rua Alves Redol 9, Lisbon, Portugal

Dreiling, A. (2009). Business Process Management and Semantic Interoperability
Challenges Ahead. Handbook on Business Process Management – Springer.

Digital Identity and Reputation in the Context of a Bounded Social Ecosystem – a literature review

Digital Identity and Reputation in the Context of a Bounded Social Ecosystem

Ben Jennings and Anthony Finkelstein
University College London London, UK

{b.jennings,a.finkelstein}@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Summary

In this article, Jennings and Finkelstein (2008), argue that the concepts of human agent reputation and trust have become critical now that social software is becoming adopted by Industry. And that for the successful integration of social software into business processes, both reputation and authority need to exist.

According to Jennings and Finkelstein (2008), incorporating social technologies within an Organisation has two key benefits: firstly business processes can be improved through socially supported interactions and secondly, by providing a means for human knowledge to be captured & reused by the Organisation. The Authors discuss the theoretical use of “social software data artefacts” to trace data creation back to a unique digital identity so that individuals can be linked to a specific activity, expertise or knowledge.

A key issue raised by Jennings and Finkelstein (2008) is that of information overload and how an excess of messaging can lead to a loss of productivity and potential abandonment of the systems. They propose the use of a computer based filtration system to rank information based on contextual importance or fit for purpose.

The Authors present that trust and reputation are based upon subjective intuition or other ambiguous signals and are key to the adoption of social software. They assert that when a Users perceived value of a social system increases, the amount of trust also increases which in turn supports further adoption.

Jennings and Finkelstein (2008) observe that enterprise social software adoption is typically conservative and non-systematic. They assert that to incorporate human agents into business processes, there must be an automated way of creating unique digital identity resources to serve as the foundations of trust and reputation.

From a Social Wiki to a Social Workflow System – a literature review

From a Social Wiki to a Social Workflow System

Gustaf Neumann, Selim Erol. Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna Austria
{Gustaf.Neumann, Selim.Erol}@wu-wien.ac.at

Summary

Neumann and Erol (2009) present their approach for using wiki applications to develop a collaborative open-source work-flow system. The Authors believe that recent developments of social software are an extension of existing collaborative applications currently inplace, designed to support unstructured communication and knowledge/information sharing.

According to Neumann and Erol (2009), the demand for social technologies such as blogs/wikis/IM/document sharing etc is evidenced by the introduction of these social components into leading business software applications. The Authors assert the intent is to provide for ease of use/networking/communication/sharing, accessibility & visibility amongst other drivers.

As a driver for the adoption of social technology to BPM, Neumann and Erol (2009) discuss how recent research indicates the need for improved flexibility within the business process management approach. Their research has highlighted “a shift from top down approaches in business process design and deployment to an approach where also bottom-up reengineering and adaption from the user side is welcomed”. This requirement for agility is an outcome of a rapidly changing business environment and the need to quickly adapt to process and Organisational changes.

In this paper, a key finding reached by the Authors on the difference between wikis and traditional workflow systems is that the usefulness of the former is based on the wisdom of the crowds (user community) rather than pre-defined workflow knowledge. The concluding section of this paper goes on to describe the implementation of a wiki based workflow system.

Towards Collaboration Maturity in Business Processes: An Exploratory Study in Oil Production Processes – a literature review

Towards Collaboration Maturity in Business Processes:
An Exploratory Study in Oil Production Processes

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1459971

Andréa Magalhãe Magdaleno, Claudia Cappelli, Fernanda Araujo Baião,
Flávia Maria Santoro and Renata Araujo NP2Tec – Research and Practice Group in Information Technology, Department of Applied Informatics, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil

Key Terms:

Collaboration; BPM; case study; Activity Theory

Summary:

Magdaleno et al (2008) use a case study based on a Brazilian oil company and cover issues associated with establishing collaborative processes and the knowledge management of business processes.

Magdaleno et al (2008) believe that if Organisations can incorporate a collaboration aspect to their modelling process, then benefits will be: an improved process understanding & higher quality process models. This statement is supported by Magdaleno, Araujo, and Borges (2007) who assert that collaboration will be increased when it is taken into account during the process modelling phase. The Authors have proposed a collaboration framework called CollabMM as a method to follow when establishing collaboration practices. This model provides a set of practices that if followed, support business process collaboration (Magdaleno, Araujo, and Borges, 2007)

The concept of Activity Theory is referred to whereby collaboration is viewed as a distributed collective activity amongst several Actors, each performing tasks in alignment with a shared objective (Clarke & Smyth, 1993). As each person involved in the collaborative activity holds information important to the group, problem solving potential is enhanced (Marwell & Schmitt, 1975).

The Authors assert that the common objectives of a process model are -> the results to be achieved; distribution of responsibilities; and coordination guidelines for the workflow. Also, by incorporating collaboration into the process models, organisations can establish a path for process improvement and knowledge sharing.

One of the key findings from this case study is the importance of selecting the right process as the addition of collaboration activities may be time consuming and increase process cost for little return (Magdaleno et al 2008).

Organizational and Technological Options for Business Process Management from the perspective of Web 2.0 – a literature review

Organizational and Technological Options for Business Process Management from the perspective of Web 2.0
via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Vanderhaeghen D, Fettke P, Loos P (2010) Organisations- und Technologieoptionen des Geschäftsprozessmanagements aus der Perspektive des Web 2.0.

Key Terms
Self organisation; collective intelligence; folksonomies

Summary:
Vanderhaeghen et al (2009) comment on the evolution of business process management into an established information systems design approach including the concepts of both business management and computer science. Aside from the derived benefits there still remains the question of how to manage those highly dynamic organisational functions that require user discretion to reach the optimum outcomes. The Authors consider that a central problem of business process management is how to effectively manage these dynamic process models.

Applications that are commonly grouped as Web 2.0 such as wikis, social networks & bookmarks are designed to take advantage of individual user capabilities and foster spontaneous input to a common context (Vanderhaeghen et al 2009). The Authors discuss how related literature by Ebersbach et al. (2008), Komus (2006), Komus and Wauch (2008), and Lai and Turban (2008) all discuss the use of wikis for process management. Also Komus and Wauch (2008) discuss how social technologies can be used in each of the BPM lifecycle phases. Vanderhaeghen et al (2009) believe that whilst the above papers do contribute to a greater understanding of how web 2.0 applications can be used in conjunction with process management, they are light on for detail of how these tools can be implemented.

The Vanderhaeghen et al (2009) paper aims to further develop and evaluate the above discussions and derive innovative organisational and technical options for process management from a Web 2.0 perspective. Key to this study are the concepts of self organisation & collective intelligence, the Authors also analyse existing process management assumptions.

Web 2.0 concepts applied to process management tasks provides some new Organisational options: (Vanderhaeghen et al 2009)
* Self-organisation. Web 2.0 assists management to decentralise the planning and control functions thus leading to “bottom-up” process design.
* Harnessing collective intelligence. In lieu of centrally planned, implemented & coordinated process management initiatives, leverage the intelligence of the process collective to develop optimal process structures.
* Move away from mechanised Organisational concepts.
* Removal of the separation between build-time & runtime – the model-reality divide.

AGILIPO: Embedding Social Software Features – a literature review

Antonio Rito Silva, Rachid Meziani, Rodrigo Magalhaes, David Martinho, Ademar Aguiar and Nuno Flores
Center for Organizational Design and Engineering – INOV, Rua Alves Redol 9, Lisbon, Portugal
http://www.fe.up.pt/si/PUBLS_PESQUISA.FORMVIEW?p_id=23068
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AGILIPO: Embedding Social Software Features

Rito-Silva et al (2009) discuss the view that business processes should not stifle human intervention and social technology should be embedded within the modelling and execution phases of these processes. They believe that this will support the bottom up design approach to model development and execution. By way of example, Rito-Silva et al (2009) describe how by employing a folksonomy approach, process stakeholders can tag their activities, share and search these tags, for the activities and comments of others (Marlow et al, 2006; Wal, 2007; Wu et al, 2006). Process modellers can then analyse these activities and create a newer version of the process model.

Rito-Silva et al (2009) discuss the work of Morgan (2002) and Cumberlidge (2007) who view BPM to be inherited from the Business Process Reengineering approach from the 1990’s. This top down, as is/to be view of process modelling is related to the model-reality divide between the process model development and implementation phases. This gap leads to a lack of understanding between the business model user and the IT model developer.

Rito-Silva et al (2009) provide insight into this issue by defining an Agile Business Process Methodology (AGILIPO) and tools designed to support a collaborative and incremental approach to BPM. The underlying concept of this paper is the iterative cycle of process improvement driven by user feedback. In addition, this collaborative approach empowers all process stakeholders to model and execute business processes iteratively and simultaneously.

The traditional as-is/to-be approach to understanding and defining process flows requires lengthy modelling activities before any intervention can commence (Rito-Silva et al, 2009). According to the Authors, this approach is not ideal due to several factors such as the different organisational perspectives of involved parties; undiscovered tacit knowledge of model users; rigid models of future change and modelling complexity for exception handling.

Rito-Silva et al (2009) believe that the solution to the model-reality divide is that the organisational BPM methodology should be agile enough to support short feedback cycles (Beck et al, 2001) and after each cycle a review is conducted to understand the impact of the last process change (Magalhaes and Rito-Silva, 2009). Key features of the agile business process proposal are model incompleteness; empowerment of the user community; intertwining of process design and execution; and design processes on a case-by-case, individual instance level.

Rito-Silva et al (2009) provide a case study to discuss the application of their AGILIPO tools to the Selling process of an online bookstore. In this case study, Modellers suggestions are captured in a wiki like application with new suggestions supporting the creation of process model revisions. This organic, knowledge creation process provides motivation of the contributors through the contributions of others (Garud et al, 2008). Communication and collaboration between process stakeholders is enabled through the use of the social technology features of folksonomy based content tagging, model versioning, stakeholder commentary and process model suitability ratings.

As outlined by Rito-Silva et al (2009), a key factor of emerging Business Process Management methodologies will be agility (Dreiling, 2009), and this is supported by the application of social technologies. This continuous improvement and knowledge creation & retention approach will assist to narrow the perceived gap between BPM designers and those who execute the models.

Web 2.0 Enhanced Automation of Collaborative Business Process Model Management in Cooperation Environments

As I near completion of my Masters of Business Process Management at Queensland University of Technology, I have undertaken to write a literature review on how Business Process Management could be supported by Social Software (web 2.0 – wikis, blogs, twitter etc).

The following are just my workings as I go through this process over the next couple of months…please excuse my initial rough drafts!!
Of course, any feedback is appreciated.

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Web 2.0 Enhanced Automation of Collaborative Business Process Model Management in Cooperation Environments

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/about/news/conferences/acis09/Proceedings/pdf/064.pdf

Thorsten Dollmann, Peter Fettke, Peter Loos
Institute for Information Systems (IWi)
at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI),
Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany
Email: thorsten.dollmann@iwi.dfki.de; peter.fettke@iwi.dfki.de; peter.loos@iwi.dfki.de

Dominik Vanderhaeghen
Deloitte Consulting Ltd.
Duesseldorf, Germany
Email: dvanderhaeghen@deloitte.de

Key Terms:
Business Process Management; Collaborative Networks; Tagging;

Summary:

The article discusses how BPM can be enhanced by web 2.0 concepts by integrating functions of cooperative modelling & using the collective intelligence.

Dollmann et al (2009) state that by implication there is an explicit divide between the part of the organisation that develops the abstract process model and the actual place of process execution -> the model-reality divide. They assert that there exists a knowledge/perspective gap that can lead to limitations in the developed process model, further compounded by an undefined feedback loop.

A recognised challenge for collaborative process modelling initiatives is the spatial distance of the contributors (Dollmann et al 2009) which also causes issues with the maintenance of distributed model repositories (Vanderhaeghen, Hofer and Kupsch 2006). The Authors clearly define their view with the statement “existing process management approaches are largely assuming a centralistic planning and controlling paradigm, the Web 2.0 perspective leads to a decentralisation of the planning and controlling tasks” (Dollmann et al 2009).

The emerging scenario of collaborative, cross-organisational business processes (Camarinha-Matos et al. 2005) can be addressed by the integration of Web 2.0 applications into the business process management approach (Dollmann et al 2009).

The Authors have also provided an interesting assessment of the different uses for “tagging” within the context of process management:
* Tagging of Actors and services to identify, search and contact Actors with specific capabilities within the process community
* Tagging of process problems and solutions to document and classify issues
* tagging of process patterns as reference models for future solutions

“BPM implies an explicit division of process design and process execution between organisational units” – i.e. there is a disconnect between those responsible for process modelling & those that execute the models – the model-reality divide as discussed by Rainer Schmidt in BPM and Social Software http://www.springerlink.com/content/tp147481w314ujq4/

Some issues identified –
* Process designers depend on others knowledge of tasks
* Modelling is always from a particular perspective & therefore has limitations
* Uncertainty around how to feedback for process improvement.

“While existing process management approaches are largely assuming a centralistic planning and controlling paradigm, the Web 2.0 perspective leads to a decentralisation of the planning and controlling tasks.” – & lowering the barriers to adoption.

This paper discusses the use of IT tools to help manage collaborative business processes. This appears driven by increasing process integration 7 collaborative business relations across organisations.

Defn of Web 2.0 –
* Self organization and utilization of collective intelligence – crowd sourcing
* Establishing of a global interconnectedness – fir geographically dispersed teams
* Assembly of data driven platforms – connected knowledge repositories
* Applications of web 2.0 are being continuously developed and enhanced by its users – application evolution
* Assembly of light-weighted architectures – quick creation & deployment

The article discusses “a platform for process management comprising different modules for the accomplishment of its specific tasks. The described modules are not tightly coupled, but rather allow for a “dynamic” runtime orchestration offering the possibility of further expansion through integration of new models with extended process management functionalities.” – This modular approach supports flexibility & responsiveness to process change.

The 4 modules –
1. Cooperative modelling management – collaborative modelling
2. Self-organization for process collaborative groups – collective intelligence
3. Transformation and converter management – supports different modelling languages
4. Management of dynamic process modules – business process configuration

The paper then goes on to discuss the actual components of the proposed architecture. The basic concept is “This can be used in both decentralized settings were global models have to be constructed as well as for modelling private processes and offers the possibility of modelling collaboratively and synchronously with different modellers in the role of peers and of communicating with these over the exchange of chat messages during the modelling process.”

Themes:

Model-Reality divide; improving knowledge exchange; cooperative modeling management; self-organisation

A Collaboration and Productiveness Analysis of the BPM Community

As I near completion of my Masters of Business Process Management at Queensland University of Technology, I have undertaken to write a literature review on how Business Process Management could be supported by Social Software (web 2.0 – wikis, blogs, twitter etc).

The following are just my workings as I go through this process over the next couple of months…please excuse my initial rough drafts!!
Of course, any feedback is appreciated.

—————————————————————-
A Collaboration and Productiveness Analysis of the BPM Community

http://www.springerlink.com/content/1w6318130081l713/

Hajo A. Reijers1, Minseok Song1, Heidi Romero1, Umeshwar Dayal2,
Johann Eder3, and Jana Koehler4
1 Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven,
The Netherlands
{h.a.reijers,m.s.song,h.l.romero}@tue.nl
2 HP Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, 94304, USA
umeshwar.dayal@hp.com
3 University of Klagenfurt, Universittsstrae 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria
johann.eder@uni-klu.ac.at
4 IBM Zurich Research Laboratory CH-8803 Rueschlikon, Switzerland
koe@zurich.ibm.com

Key Terms:
Social network analysis;

Summary:

Pertains to the annual international BPM conference & the authorship networks that have developed from these conferences 2003-2008.

“this paper identifies the hotbed of BPM research and maps the progressive collaboration patterns within the BPM community.”

The Authors use the defn “Business Process Management (BPM) has been characterized as the study of those methods, techniques, and software that can be used to design, enact, control, and analyze operational processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information” – same defn as used by Reijers H. in A Collaboration and Productiveness Analysis of the BPM Community.

So this paper is more about collaboration between BPM Researchers than Organisational process collaboration – can draw some similarities though….

Themes:
Co-authorship networks;