In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The book’s target groups include researchers, PhD students and Master students in the field of information systems. After reading the book, they will better understand PAIS flexibility aspects. To support the easy use as a textbook, a series of exercises is provided at the end of each chapter and slides and further teaching material are available on the book’s web site www.flexible-processes.com. Professionals specializing in business process management (BPM) who want to obtain a good understanding of flexibility challenges in BPM and state-of-the-art solutions will also benefit from the presentations of open source as well as commercial process management systems and related practical scenarios.

A unifying foundation to design and implement process-aware information systems This publication takes on the formidable task of establishing a unifying foundation and set of common underlying principles to effectively model, design, and implement process-aware information systems. Authored by leading authorities and pioneers in the field, Process-Aware Information Systems helps readers gain a thorough understanding of major concepts, languages, and techniques for building process-aware applications, including: * UML and EPCs: two of the most widely used notations for business process modeling * Concrete techniques for process design and analysis * Process execution standards: WfMC and BPEL * Representative commercial tools: ARIS, TIBCO Staffware, and FLOWer Each chapter begins with a description of the problem domain and then progressively unveils relevant concepts and techniques. Examples and illustrations are used extensively to clarify and simplify complex material. Each chapter ends with a set of exercises, ranging from simple questions to thought-provoking assignments. Sample solutions for many of the exercises are available on the companion Web site. Armed with a new and deeper understanding, readers are better positioned to make their own contributions to the field and evaluate various approaches to a particular task or problem. This publication is recommended as a textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in computer science and information systems, as well as for professionals involved in workflow and business process management, groupware and teamwork, enterprise application integration, and business-to-business integration. A Solution's Manual is available online. An Instructor Support FTP site is also available.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2008, held in Milan, Italy, in September 2008. The volume contains 20 revised full research papers and 3 industrial papers carefully reviewed and selected from 154 submissions, as well as 8 prototype demonstration papers selected out of 15 demo submissions. In addition three invited keynote papers are presented. The conference has a record of attracting innovative research of the highest quality related to all aspects of BPM, including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, standards, and empirical findings.

Information modeling plays an important role in every level of the enterprise information system’s architecture. Modeling allows organizations to adapt and become more efficient, helping top managers and engineers outline tactics to reach strategic objectives, understand organizational needs, and design information systems that are aligned with business goals. New Perspectives on Information Systems Modeling and Design is an essential reference source that discusses organizational adaptation through the integration of new information technologies into existing processes and underlying supporting applications. Featuring research on topics such as application integration, change management, and mobile process activities, this book is ideally designed for managers, researchers, system developers, entrepreneurs, graduate-level students, business professionals, information system engineers, and academicians seeking coverage on emerging technological developments and practical solutions for system modeling and design.

While business functions such as manufacturing, operations, and marketing often utilize various software applications, they tend to operate without the ability to interact with each other and exchange data. This provides a challenge to gain an enterprise-wide view of a business and to assist real-time decision making. Service-Driven Approaches to Architecture and Enterprise Integration addresses the issues of integrating assorted software applications and systems by using a service driven approach. Supporting the dynamics of business needs, this book highlights the tools, techniques, and governance aspects of design, and implements cost-effective enterprise integration solutions. It is a valuable source of information for software architects, SOA practitioners, and software engineers as well as researchers and students in pursuit of extensible and agile software design.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the confederated international conferences: Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2013), Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA-Trusted Cloud 2013), and Ontologies, Data Bases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE 2013) held as part of OTM 2013 in September 2013 in Graz, Austria. The 47 revised full papers presented together with 6 short papers and 5 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 137 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on business process management; process modelling; service management; social networking; models and schemas; technical advances in cloud computing; towards trusted cloud computing; privacy for the cloud; querying and mining semantic information; semantic matching and mapping; semantic information management; semantics in use.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2014, held in Barcelona, Spain, April 2014, organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), and technically sponsored by the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The purpose of the WEBIST series of conferences is to bring together researches, engineers and practitioners interested in technological advances and business applications of web-based information systems. The 21 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected originally 153 paper submissions. They were organized in topical sections names, internet technology; web interfaces and applications; society, e-business and e-government; web intelligence; and mobile information systems. The book also contains two invited talks in full-paper length.