Enabling Holistic Approaches to Business Process Lifecycle Management

Press Room

• Effective Business Process Management
  Wolfgang Back und Wolfgang Rudolph im Gespräch mit Prof. Andreas Oberweis

Summary

Process modeling tools and techniques are used in different phases of a business process management project. At the level of modeling, the basic formalisms proposed for modeling business processes, tend to focus very heavily on the side of process, without enabling equally rich modeling of the data and information that is being manipulated by the processes. More broadly, the research is largely independent of the overall lifecycle of business process management, including evolution of business processes over time, and design of business processes from already existing business processes.

The purpose of this seminar was to bring together a cross-disciplinary group of academic and industry researchers from the areas of Information Systems/Business Process Management, Service and Software Engineering, Semantic Technologies and Human Computer Interaction to foster a better understanding of how to manage the lifecycle of business process models, ranging from initial design, evolution, implementation, and monitoring. The primary emphasis was on paradigms and technologies that enable a more holistic perspective, including new modeling techniques, new conceptualizations and visualizations, applications of recommendation system and other social networking techniques, and more flexible implementations. While there have been a number of Dagstuhl Seminars focused on modeling issues pertaining to distinct phases of a modeling project, such as Process, Service or Software Engineering, there has not been a seminar to gather specialists from across several disciplines to study this lifecycle management challenge.

We believe that each of these technologies is separately important for advancing the state of the art in managing the lifecycle of business processes, and that a dramatic improvement can be obtained if the four areas work in a coordinated way.