Guest editorial
Ilia BiderCofounder and Director R&D of IbisSoft based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has MS in Electronic Engineering from Moscow Institute of Electronics and PhD in Computer and System Sciences from Swedish Royal Institute of Technology. He has combined experience of 30 years of research (in the fields of business modelling, computational linguistics, databases), and practical work (business analysis, and software design, coding, sales, and marketing) in five countries (Norway, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States). Dr Bider has published over 25 research papers as well as a number of articles for practitioners. His main specialty is finding research topics in his business practice, and testing research results in the business practice. Dr Bider is an inventor of the state-oriented approach to business process modelling that is based on the application of the conceptual ideas of the Mathematical system theory to the realm of business processes. This approach has been successfully tested in business analysis and application development practice of IbisSoft and its partners. Dr Bider puts a lot of effort in bridging the gap between the academics and practitioners. He co-founded a series of international workshops on business process modelling where both academics and practitioners meet for fruitful discussions. He holds tutorials at international conferences to highlight the needs of practitioners for academic public. He sits on the editorial board of BMPJ as a representative for practitioners.
Paul JohannessonReceived his BSc in Mathematics, and his PhD in Computer Science from Stockholm University in 1983 and 1993, respectively. He became docent in 1995. He holds a position as Professor at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, where he works in the area of information systems. Professor Johannesson has published works on federated information systems, translation between data models, languages for conceptual modelling, schema integration, use of linguistic instruments in information systems, process integration, e-commerce systems design, and analysis patterns in systems design. He is the co-author of a textbook on conceptual modelling, published by Prentice Hall. He has been a member of several EU projects on knowledge based systems and requirements engineering. He has been the project leader of and participated in several national projects on information integration, the use of IT in teaching information systems design, process modelling and integration, and IT in health care. Professor Johannesson is and has been a member of several international program committees; among these are the ER conference and the CAiSE conference. Professor Johannesson is head of the research laboratory SYSLAB at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology.
The notion of goal is one of the most important concepts of business process modelling, and it is included, implicitly or explicitly, in various definitions of business process, e.g.: “a business process is a set of partially ordered activities aimed at reaching a goal”. However, most of the research and practical work in the domain of business process modelling is devoted to describing and formalizing the order of activities rather than to the explication and representation of goals. One consequence of focusing on activity ordering is the well-known problem of workflow inflexibility.
Another problem resulting from insufficient clarification of the notion of goal is that goals of different levels are not clearly separated, and strategic goals, like customer satisfaction, are considered on the operational level. The latter can confuse participants of a business process who need to rely on the established policies in their everyday work, rather than on the abstract notion of customer satisfaction.
There is an urgent need for practice of business process modelling,reengineering, and management to get better understanding of various kinds of goals, and find appropriate ways for their conceptual and formal representation.
The objective of this special issue of BPMJ is to try to clarify the connection between the notions of goal and business process. The issue is a follow-up of the discussions at the Workshop on Goal-Oriented Business Process Modelling held in London on 2 September 2002 in memory of Dr Maxim Khomyakov (www.ibissoft.se/gbpm02/gbpm02.htm).
The papers presented in this issue cover a wide spectrum of topics, related to the notions of goals in the business process domain. The presentation order is intentionally chosen to represent logical connections that exist between, at least, some of the papers.
Kueng in his expert view “The Power of Goal-Based Processes”analyses the relationships between goals, business processes, and support systems.
Nurcan et al. in their paper “A Strategy Driven Business Process Modelling Approach” suggest an approach for business process modelling in which a process is defined in terms of goals and strategies of reaching these goals. Each strategy can be refined by representing it in goal-strategy terms of the next level of detail. The approach allows an analyst to choose an appropriate level of details when analysing and redesigning business processes. The paper demonstrates the use of the approach for business process redesign.
Andersson et al. in their paper “Towards a Formal Definition of Goal-Oriented Business Process Patterns” discuss a way of defining business process patterns based on the notion of operational goal and allowed movements towards this goal. The paper argues that the state-oriented view on business processes is suitable for defining goal-oriented patterns. The paper discusses possible use of goal-oriented patterns for finding appropriate best practices for a given business context.
Soffer and Wand in their paper “On the Notion of Soft-Goals in Business Process Modelling” suggest a way of formalizing the notion of so-called“soft-goals” in the frame of business process modelling. The soft-goals are the goals that cannot be expressed in respect to a particular instance of a business process, but require consideration of all (or many)instances of the same process, or even of a number of interconnected business processes. To such goals belong performance goals (e.g. an average delivery time), and quality goals. The paper demonstrates a potential use of the formalism for consistency analysis of business process models with metrics.
Balasubramanian and Mayank in their paper “Structural metrics for goal based business process design and evaluation” present a list of structural metrics of business processes that could be used for approximation of performance goals at the stage of business process redesign. The paper explains from what view on a business process each structural metric can be calculated and what kind of performance goals it can approximate. The use of the approximation approach is demonstrated by an example.
Regev et al. in their paper “Modelling the regulative role of business processes with use and misuse cases” argue that business processes are the main regulatory mechanisms for an organization to survive and flourish in a given business environment. Based on the idea of maintaining a“homeostasis”, the paper differentiates three levels of business processes that have different kinds of goals, and shows interconnection between the processes of different levels and the environment. The paper suggests using the “Use and Misuse Cases” technique for modelling interconnections between processes of different levels and between the processes and the environment.
Heinrich in his paper “Transforming strategic goals of CRM into process goals and activities” discusses one particular task of maintaining “homeostasis”with the environment, namely maintaining and/or reaching a certain level of customer relationship. The paper analyses processes and activities that can help to achieve the maintenance goal. It shows that the goal cannot be fully reached through the product related processes, e.g. sales or delivery. Specially designed processes and activities may be required for reaching the goal.
The guest editors would like to thank our referee group, which consisted of seven referees, for their hard work of reviewing the submitted papers, and Dr Majed Al-Mashari, the Editor of BPMJ, for his assistance in preparation of the special issue.
Ilia Bider and Paul JohannessonGuest Editors
