Semantic Business Process Management: Scaling Up the Management of Business Processes

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. Despite its success however, BPM suffers from a lack of automation that would support a smooth transition between the business world and the IT world. We argue that Semantic BPM, that is, the enhancement of BPM with Semantic Web Services technologies, provides further scalability to BPM by increasing the level of automation that can be achieved. We describe the particular SBPM approach developed within the SUPER project and we illustrate how it contributes to enhancing existing BPM solutions in order to achieve more flexible, dynamic and manageable business processes.

A Knowledge-Based Framework

“…This capacity for selecting the service to be executed at runtime is what is often referred to as late binding. Late binding support brings manageability to processes by specifying sets of suitable services by means of Goals (24). Additionally, this feature supports deferring the selection of the service to be utilised until runtime where concrete contextual information regarding the services (e.g., their latest performance, availability, price, etc) can be taken into account.…”

The Discovery of Agile Service Networks through the Use of Social Network Analysis

“…Nowadays, organisations are forced to adapt their processes at a much faster pace than before [6]. Managers must also be proactive, reactive and more decisive at a faster rate than ever before.…”

“…ability to extract unstructured data, on a single organisation). Pedrinaci et al, [6] and [25] explains that there is an urgent need for deploying solutions capable of deriving more sophisticated insights of business processes. The ability to quickly extract accurate data from ASN presents business with more opportunity to gain competitive advantage and identify automated agile value of business processes within their cross-organisational network.…”

“…Increasing levels of attention is being placed upon customer satisfaction, of which timely and customised services are the key concepts. Pedrinaci et al, [6] explains that there is an urgent need for deploying solutions able to adapt business processes in a more agile and less timely manner, guided by the existing specific objectives and organisational strategies. Afsarmanesh and CamarinhaMatos [2] explore the concept of VBE and report a number of factors in their design of a VBE framework, including competency management, value system, system of metrics, and trust management within the network.…”

“…Many e-markets, may be considered as a system which facilitates the electronic exchange of information and business intelligence to conduct one or several business transactions, are sustained through the relationships made available through several Web services II. BACKGROUND Today, organisations are now forced to adapt their processes at a much faster pace than they have experienced before [6], and must also be proactive, reactive, and more decisive at a much faster rate than ever before. Organisations are surrounded by the need to frequently change to meet consumer needs and failing to do so will put the organisation at risk.…”