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Today event-driven business process management has matured from a scientific vision to a realizable methodology for companies of all sizes and shapes. This vision can be applied for business monitoring, as well as for compliance monitoring. However, leveraging the power of complex event processing for supporting business process monitoring is cumbersome because of the complicated modeling of rules and alerts as well as key performance indicators (KPIs) in machine readable format using the event languages. However, using a model-driven approach for generating a monitoring infrastructure based on events like the a Pro architecture is one possibility to enable companies with various infrastructures to leverage the advantages of business process monitoring. This article describes how KPIs are modeled and transferred into event rules by a model-driven approach. Two use cases are the basis for defining requirements and evaluating the approach, showing it tackles challenges from business monitoring as well as from compliance monitoring

Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational agents. So-called chatbots have reached maturity for industrial applications. German insurance companies are interested in improving their customer service and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies by determining which classes of agents are of interest to insurance companies, finding relevant use cases and requirements, and developing a prototype for an exemplary insurance scenario. Based on this approach, we derive key findings for conversational agent implementation in insurance companies.

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Business success of companies heavily depends on the availability and performance of their client applications. Due to modern development paradigms such as DevOps and microservice architectural styles, applications are decoupled into services with complex interactions and dependencies. Although these paradigms enable individual development cycles with reduced delivery times, they cause several challenges to manage the services in distributed systems. One major challenge is to observe and monitor such distributed systems. This paper provides a qualitative study to understand the challenges and good practices in the field of observability and monitoring of distributed systems. In 28 semi-structured interviews with software professionals we discovered increasing complexity and dynamics in that field. Especially observability becomes an essential prerequisite to ensure stable services and further development of client applications. However, the participants mentioned a discrepancy in the awareness regarding the importance of the topic, both from the management as well as from the developer perspective. Besides technical challenges, we identified a strong need for an organizational concept including strategy, roles and responsibilities. Our results support practitioners in developing and implementing systematic observability and monitoring for distributed systems.