Business Process Management

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

The WS-BPEL 2.0 specification [WS-BPEL 2.0] provides a language for formally describing business processes and business interaction protocols. WS-BPEL was designed to extend the Web Services interaction model to support business transactions.

This article presents Gaia: a methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. The Gaia methodology is both general, in that it is applicable to a wide range of multi-agent systems, and comprehensive, in that it deals with both the macro-level (societal) and the micro-level (agent) aspects of systems. Gaia is founded on the view of a multi-agent system as a computational organisation consisting of various interacting roles. We illustrate Gaia through a case study (an agent-based business process management system).

Although the International Safety Management (ISM) Code was fully implemented from July 1 st 2002, not all countries who are signatories of the Code i.e. in most developing countries such as Pacific Island states are successful in the introduction and implementation of the Code. In this paper, we aim to determine factors that facilitate the successful implementation of the ISM Code particularly for this region. Through thorough literature review, a model of 11 critical factors for the Code implementation success was proposed. These factors were empirically tested using the triangulation of a survey of a group of maritime administration personnel and shipping companies in Fiji and two in-depth interviews with senior officers in Samoa maritime administration during June -August, 2007. It is revealed from this research that proposed factors are verified by both survey respondents and interview informants, in that maritime safety awareness rooted in a safety culture, senior management commitment and leadership across organisations and the industry, employee involvement and empowerment, enforcement capability of flag state administration, application of quality management principles in safety management systems, rationalisation of documentation, among others, are essential to implement the Code successfully. It is expected that this research contributes to the literature and management practice in which maritime administrations and shipping companies in the Pacific Islands states can use findings from this research to speed up their ISM Code implementation and leading to a successful completion. Some future research directions are desired, e.g. conducting the same research in other Pacific Island states, as well as in other developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. These aim to enhance the validity and reliability of this research's instruments and findings.

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system solutions are currently in high demand by both manufacturing and service organisations because they provide a tightly integrated solution to an organisation's information system needs. During the last decade, ERP systems have received a significant amount of attention from researchers and practitioners from a variety of functional disciplines. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the research literature (1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003) concerning ERP systems is presented. The literature is further classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed. Following a comprehensive review of the literature, proposals for future research are formulated to identify topics where fruitful opportunities exist.

Historically, business process design has been driven by business objectives, specifically process improvement. However this cannot come at the price of control objectives which stem from various legislative, standard and business partnership sources. Ensuring the compliance to regulations and industrial standards is an increasingly important issue in the design of business processes. This warrants a systematic approach to assist in the design of compliant business processes. In this paper, we advocate the importance of compliance in business process management and argue that control objectives should be addressed at an early stage, i.e., design time, so as to minimize the problems of runtime compliance checking and consequent violations and penalties. This paper specifically presents a quantitative measure of compliance for a given process model against a set of control objectives. The associated methods will allow process designers to comparatively assess the compliance degree of their design as well as be better informed on the cost of noncompliance.

Purpose -To provide an integrated architecture framework for e-government that represents the alignment of IT infrastructure with business process management in public sector organisations and classify the barriers that might complicate the implementation of the proposed architecture framework. The study will help IT practitioners in the public sector learn how to use and manage information technologies to revitalise business processes, improve decision-making, and gain a competitive advantage from the adoption of e-government. The proposed architecture framework for e-government adoption will reduce confusion surrounding e-government infrastructure in the public sector through understanding the implementation processes, identifying requirements of information and communications technology tools, highlighting the importance of the organisational management resources and the impact of barriers. Design/methodology/approach -A range of earlier studies have been critically examined and analysed to provide an integrated architecture framework for e-government adoption that can address and identify the standards, infrastructure components, applications, and technologies for e-government. The authors have divided the architecture framework into four layers; access layer, e-government layer, e-business layer, and infrastructure layer; each layer addresses a particular aspect of e-government architecture. This paper then presents a critical analysis of barriers experienced in public sector organisations, which prevent the successful adoption of e-government; such barriers being presented in a taxonomy. Findings -Defined organisational and technological requirements that will be necessary for the adoption of e-government in public sector organisations through construct an integrated architecture framework for e-government. The difficulties and barriers that have been experienced in public sector organisations which complicate the implementation process of e-government have been analysed and then identified and presented in a taxonomy. Originality/value -The paper provides architecture framework for e-government adoption that can help to guide IT managers recognise the technological and organisational requirements for e-government adoption in public sector organisations. The framework can also help the decision makers to set a vision statement and strategic action plan for future direction in the information technology age through identifying key elements and stages for action. The authors also identify and classify the perceived barriers that might complicate the implementation process of e-government projects. The awareness of these barriers is important for any e-government project since they will alert the e-government project team with any problems or challenges might be existed during the implementation process so they will be ready to overcome them.

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth U.S.$59 billion. The study shows with very high statistical significance that forecasters generally do a poor job of estimating the demand for transportation infrastructure projects. For 9 out of 10 rail projects, passenger forecasts are overestimated; the average overestimation is 106%. For half of all road projects, the difference between actual and forecasted traffic is more than ±20%. The result is substantial financial risks, which are typically ignored or downplayed by planners and decision makers to the detriment of social and economic welfare. Our data also show that forecasts have not become more accurate over the 30-year period studied, despite claims to the contrary by forecasters. The causes of inaccuracy in forecasts are different for rail and road projects, with political causes playing a larger role for rail than for road. The cure is transparency, accountability, and new forecasting methods. The challenge is to change the governance structures for forecasting and project development. Our article shows how planners may help achieve this.

In IT management, maturity models have proved to be an important instrument because they allow for a better positioning of the organization and help find better solutions for change. Over the last few years, over a hundred maturity models have been developed to support IT management. However, the procedures and methods that led to these models have only been documented very sketchily. Using a scientific approach, we have developed criteria for the development of maturity models. These criteria also serve as a basis for the comparison of sparsely documented maturity approaches. The results thus obtained have been generalised and consolidated into a generally applicable model. A case study will illustrate the applicability of our model. The results of this paper are meant to serve as a manual for methodically well-founded designs and evaluations of maturity models.

When implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, top management commonly faces an unwanted attitude from potential users ± for one reason or another, they resist the implementation process. Top management should, therefore, proactively deal with this problem instead of reactively confronting it. In this paper, I describe an integrated, processoriented approach for facing the complex social problem of workers' resistance to ERP.

Web services based on the service-oriented architecture framework provide a suitable technical foundation for making business processes accessible within enterprises and across enterprises. But to appropriately support dynamic business processes and their management, more is needed, namely, the ability to prescribe how Web services are used to implement activities within a business process, how business processes are represented as Web services, and also which business partners perform what parts of the actual business process. In this paper, the relationship between Web services and the management of business processes is worked out and presented in a tutorial-like manner. Web services are unanimously supported by major suppliers of middleware technology (see for example References 1-5). Standards in this area, such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), 6 WSDL (Web Services Description Language), 7 and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), 8 are being proposed or agreed on, and serve as a basis for implementing product features. Many vendors provide early implementations of technologies and proposed or drafted standards (see for example References 9, 10). The World Wide Web Consortium runs a working group defining a set of standards in this area. Known as the "XML (Extensible Markup Language) Protocol," 11 it is based on input collected from vendors and early adopters of this technology. 12 One of the components of the XML Protocol will have to describe how Web services are integrated into business processes; proposals for such a standard can be found in References 13 and 14.

After explaining why business executives and academics should consider thinking about a rigorous approach to e-business models, we introduce a new e-Business Model Ontology. Using the concept of business models can help companies understand, communicate and share, change, measure, simulate and learn more about the different aspects of e-business in their firm. The generic e-Business Model Ontology (a rigorous definition of the e-business issues and their interdependencies in a company's business model), which we outline in this paper is the foundation for the development of various useful tools for e-business management and IS Requirements Engineering. The e-Business Model Ontology is based on an extensive literature review and describes the logic of a "business system" for creating value in the Internet era. It is composed of four main pillars, which are Product Innovation, Infrastructure Management, Customer Relationship and Financial Aspects. These elements are then further decomposed.

Today's process-aware information systems tend to either support business processes or provide flexibility. Classical workflow management systems offer good process support as long as the processes are structured and do not require much flexibility. Information systems that allow for flexibility have a tendency to lack process-related support. If systems offer guidance, then they are typically also inclined to "enforce guidelines" and are perceived as inflexible. Moreover, implementing flexible systems is far from trivial. This paper will show that using a more declarative approach can assist in a better balance between flexibility and support. This is demonstrated by presenting the Declare framework that aims to take care of the full spectrum of flexibility while at the same time supports the user using recommendations and other process-mining-based diagnostics.

Business process design is primarily driven by process improvement objectives. However, the role of control objectives stemming from regulations and standards is becoming increasingly important for businesses in light of recent events that led to some of the largest scandals in corporate history. As organizations strive to meet compliance agendas, there is an evident need to provide systematic approaches that assist in the understanding of the interplay between (often conflicting) business and control objectives during business process design. In this paper, our objective is twofold. We will firstly present a research agenda in the space of business process compliance, identifying major technical and organizational challenges. We then tackle a part of the overall problem space, which deals with the effective modeling of control objectives and subsequently their propagation onto business process models. Control objective modeling is proposed through a specialized modal logic based on normative systems theory, and the visualization of control objectives on business process models is achieved procedurally. The proposed approach is demonstrated in the context of a purchase-to-pay scenario.

The development of new services through the integration of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to create and streamline business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, as Web services are often autonomous and heterogeneous entities, connecting and coordinating them in order to build integrated services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system through which existing Web services can be declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services can be executed following a peer-to-peer paradigm, within a dynamic environment. This system provides tools for specifying composite services through. statecharts, data conversion rules, and provider selection, policies. These specifications are then translated into XML documents that can be interpreted by peer-to-peer inter-connected software components, in order to provision the composite service without requiring a central authority

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the de-facto standard for representing in a very expressive graphical way the processes occurring in virtually every kind of organization one can think of, from cuisine recipes to the Nobel Prize assignment process, incident management, e-mail voting systems, travel booking procedures, to name a few. In this work, we give an overview of BPMN and we present what are the links with other well-known machineries such as BPEL and XPDL. We give an assessment of how the OMG's BPMN standard is perceived and used by practitioners in everyday business process modeling chores.

Business Process Management (BPM) has been identified as the number one business priority by a recent Gartner study ). However, BPM has a plethora of facets as its origins are in Business Process Reengineering, Process Innovation, Process Modelling, and Workflow Management to name a few. Organisations increasingly recognize the requirement for an increased process orientation and require appropriate comprehensive frameworks, which help to scope and evaluate their BPM initiative. This research project aims toward the development of a holistic and widely accepted BPM maturity model, which facilitates the assessment of BPM capabilities. This paper provides an overview about the current model with a focus on the actual model development utilizing a series of Delphi studies. The development process includes separate studies that focus on further defining and expanding the six core factors within the model, i.e. strategic alignment, governance, method, Information Technology, people and culture.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

This paper focuses on problems and their causes and cures in policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects. First, it identifies as the main problem in major infrastructure developments pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A consequence of misinformation is cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and waste. Second, it explores the causes of misinformation and finds that political-economic explanations best account for the available evidence: planners and promoters deliberately misrepresent costs, benefits, and risks in order to increase the likelihood that it is their projects, and not those of their competition, that gain approval and funding. This results in the ‘survival of the unfittest’, in which often it is not the best projects that are built, but the most misrepresented ones. Finally, it presents measures for reforming policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects with a focus on better planning methods and changed governance structures, the latter being more important.

Donaldson T. (1996). Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home. Harvard Business Review, 74(5), 48-62.
    In the article Values in Tension: Ethics Away From Home, Thomas Donaldson questioned how leaders evaluate, consider and develop ethical leadership abroad. Additionally, he suggested solutions on how to establish ethical leadership standards based on business intelligence, basic values and good common sense.  His article explored the values in America in comparison to other nations, and attempted to drive home the point that there should be standards, in spite of differences, and values even when there is tension. Donaldson presented various examples that raised the question; when is different just different, and when is different wrong? He gave some examples that illustrated what would not be acceptable in America yet, is tolerated in other countries. He opened by asking some thought provoking questions to probe deep into the issues and concerns of global leadership ethics and values.

A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk, based on theories of decision making under uncertainty which won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. First, the paper documents inaccuracy and risk in project management. Second, it explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for a promising new method called "reference class forecasting," which achieves accuracy by basing forecasts on actual performance in a reference class of comparable projects and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first instance of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost forecasts for large transportation infrastructure projects. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.

The globalisation of markets has led to an increased demand for language translation services that support and enable communication between economic partners. For example, technical documents, software systems, business documents and web sites all need to be translated into multiple languages for individual national markets, and the information that they contain changes periodically. This paper sets out a theoretical framework that describes the architectures of business processes within and between separate firms that are used to support the delivery and management of services. This is done by coordinating the fit between externally generated problem complexity, from customers, and the internally generated complexity of different potential network configuration solutions. The theoretical framework is an architecture of how complexity is generated and managed at the different structural levels and across the different processual stages of an industry. A case study of thebigword, a major international translation services company, illustrates how the framework is applied in practice. The case study analyses the implementation of an electronic market platform which enables the coordination of the different stakeholders involved in the translation services market. These stakeholders include translators, translation services companies and their clients in a global business network.

Identifying the business value of information technology (IT) investments has been a major concern of managers and researchers. Various studies have addressed this issue but have provided contradictory results. Here, we explore the relationship between IT investments and firm performance using a relatively new technique, multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), and attempt to answer two questions: (1) do investments in IT have a positive impact on organizational productivity? and (2) for a given level of investment, what portion of the total should be invested in IT to maximize organizational productivity? Our results suggest that depending on the conditions that applied, an unbiased observer could either conclude that investments in IT has a positive statistically significant effect on productivity, or that there is a 'productivity' paradox. This suggests that the relationship between IT investments and organizational performance is much more complex than that found in some other studies. Our results could also provide guidance to managers who are responsible for determining the allocation of organizational resources. #

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.

 Read the textbook chapter on JIT and the enclosed article that relates to JIT, lean systems, and six-sigma.  Do you agree or disagree that the lean and six-sigma approaches are just "fads", repackaged from total quality management (TQM)? o Even if they are extensions of TQM does this mean they are "fads" that will total disappear in a short time? Or could they be more enduring in some fashion? o Give some examples from your own experience or from recent publications (print or online) to further develop your response.  Use at least four concepts or discussion points from the article and expand upon your position.

The growing complexity of processes in many organizations stimulates the adoption of business process analysis techniques. Typically, such techniques are based on process models and assume that the operational processes in reality conform to these models. However, experience shows that reality often deviates from hand-made models. Therefore, the problem of checking to what extent the operational process conforms to the process model is important for process management, process improvement, and compliance.

Compliance rules describe regulations, policies and quality constraints business processes must adhere to. Given the large number of rules and their frequency of change, manual compliance checking can become a time-consuming task. Automated compliance checking of process activities and their ordering is an alternative whenever business processes and compliance rules are described in a formal way. This paper introduces an approach for automated compliance checking. Compliance rules are translated into temporal logic formulae that serve as input to model checkers which in turn verify whether a process model satisfies the requested compliance rule. To address the problem of state-space explosion we employ a set of reduction rules. The approach is prototypically realized and evaluated.

Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations.We
present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve
many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy
that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner
that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We
also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows
us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved
decision support.

As travelers are becoming more price sensitive, less brand loyal and more sophisticated, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) becomes a strategic necessity for attracting and increasing guests' patronage. Although CRM in hospitality has overstated the importance of ICT, it is now widely recognised that successful CRM implementation should effectively combine and align ICT functionality with business operations. Given the lack of a widely accepted framework for CRM implementation, this paper proposed a model for managing and integrating ICT capabilities into CRM strategies and business processes. The model argues that successful CRM implementation requires the management and alignment of three managerial processes: ICT, relationship (internal and external) and knowledge management. The model is tested by gathering data from Greek hotels, while findings provide useful practical implications and suggestions for future research. r (M. Sigala). transparency and the new e-business models (e.g. online auctions) enhance tourists' purchasing power, who are becoming more price sensitive, less brand loyal, more sophisticated and experience seekers (Gilmore and . The hotel industry is also experiencing increased globalisation, competition, higher customer turnover, growing customer acquisition costs and rising customer expectations, meaning that hotels' performance and competitiveness is significantly dependent on their ability to satisfy customers efficiently and effectively (e.g. Olsen and Connolly, 2000; Gilmore and Pine, 1997). To enhance profitability and guest loyalty, hotels must nowadays focus on implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies that aim to seek, gather and store the right information, validate and share it throughout the entire organisation and then use it throughout all organisational levels for creating personalised, unique guests' experiences .

The paper gives an overview of an approach to modelling and evaluating business processes at conceptual level. We show which steps would be needed to create an object-oriented business process model, and how business process models can be evaluated against nonfunctional goals. Overall, we get some kind of guarantee that business process models are useful. They facilitate not only the communication between team members, they can be seen as an essential prerequisite for information system developers. Nevertheless, although models are useful we have to accept that an evaluation of a business process can only be partial if it is carried out at model level.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

There has been a huge influx of business process modeling languages as business process management (BPM) and process-aware information systems continue to expand into various business domains. The origins of process modeling languages are quite diverse, although two dominant approaches can be observed; one based on graphical models, and the other based on rule specifications. However, at this time, there is no report in literature that specifically targets a comparative analysis of these two approaches, on aspects such as the relative areas of application, power of expression, and limitations. In this paper we have attempted to address this question. We will present both a survey of the two approaches as well as a critical and comparative analysis.