The company's sustainable competitive advantage derives from its capacity to create value for customers and to adapt the operational practices to changing situations. Business processes are the heart of each company. Therefore process excellence has become a key issue. This book introduces a novel approach focusing on the autonomous optimization of business processes by applying sophisticated machine learning techniques such as Relational Reinforcement Learning and Particle Swarm Optimization.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2011, held in Poznań, Poland, in June 2011. The 25 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. Following this year's conference theme of "Towards Flexible, Personalized and Adaptive Business Applications," the contributions were grouped into eight sections on business rules, business process verification, business process variants and composition, business process improvement, data modeling and integration, Internet science, modern enterprises, and specific business information systems issues.

Business process management (BPM) constitutes one of the most exciting - search areas in computer science and the BPM Conference together with its workshops provides a distinct platform for presenting the latest research and showing future directions in this area. These proceedings contain the ?nal v- sions of papers accepted for the workshops held in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2009). The BPM 2009 conference and workshops took place in Ulm, Germany. We received many interesting workshop proposals, eight of which were selected. Ultimately the workshops ran on September 7, 2009 featuring highly interesting keynotes, inspiring scienti?c presentations, and fruitful discussions. The history of ?ve years of BPM workshops in a row proves the continued success of the workshop program. Theworkshopsheldin2009includedonenewworkshoponempiricalresearch in business process management and seven well-established workshops. First International Workshop on Empirical Research in Business Process Management(ER-BPM 2009). The ER-BPM 2009 workshop addressed the demand for empirical research methods such as experimental or case studies to BPM and invited fellow colleagues to investigate both the potential and the limitations of BPM methods and technologies in practice. The ER-BPM workshop aimed at closing the gap in knowledge on process management and at discussing empirical research in the space of BPM and associated phenomena. 12th International Workshop on Reference Modeling (RefMod 2009). Although conceptual models have proven to be a useful means to support information systems engineering in the past few years, creating and especiallymaintainingconceptualmodelscanbequitechallengingandcostly.

As tech giants and startups disrupt every market, those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century, just as the masters of mass production defined the landscape in the 20th. Unfortunately, business and technology leaders are woefully ill-equipped to solve the problems posed by digital transformation. At the current rate of disruption, half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next ten years. A new approach is needed. In Project to Product, Value Stream Network pioneer and technology business leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework—a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery. The Flow Framework will enable your company’s evolution from project-oriented dinosaur to product-centric innovator that thrives in the Age of Software. If you’re driving your organization’s transformation at any level, this is the book for you.

Recently, nature has stimulated many successful techniques, algorithms, and computational applications allowing conventionally difficult problems to be solved through novel computing systems. Nature-Inspired Informatics for Intelligent Applications and Knowledge Discovery: Implications in Business, Science, and Engineering provides the latest findings in nature-inspired algorithms and their applications for breakthroughs in a wide range of disciplinary fields. This defining reference collection contains chapters written by leading researchers and well-known academicians within the field, offering readers a valuable and enriched accumulation of knowledge.

"This work is a comprehensive, four-volume reference addressing major issues, trends, and areas for advancement in information management research, containing chapters investigating human factors in IT management, as well as IT governance, outsourcing, and diffusion"--Provided by publisher.

Intelligent business analytics is an emerging technology that has become a mainstream market adopted broadly across industries, organizations, and geographic regions. Intelligent business analytics is a current focus for research and development across academia and industries and must be examined and considered thoroughly so businesses can apply the technology appropriately. The Handbook of Research on Foundations and Applications of Intelligent Business Analytics examines the technologies and applications of intelligent business analytics and discusses the foundations of intelligent analytics such as intelligent mining, intelligent statistical modeling, and machine learning. Covering topics such as augmented analytics and artificial intelligence systems, this major reference work is ideal for scholars, engineers, professors, practitioners, researchers, industry professionals, academicians, and students.