Marcus Fischer, Florian Imgrund, Christian Janiesch and Axel Winkelmann
Digital transformation has been changing the economic environment of enterprises in recent years. To remain competitive, they rely on an extensible software architecture, flexible…
Abstract
Purpose
Digital transformation has been changing the economic environment of enterprises in recent years. To remain competitive, they rely on an extensible software architecture, flexible workflow execution, and automated decision management. The concepts of service-oriented architectures (SOA), business process management (BPM), and business rules management (BRM) provide an adequate, yet isolated means of addressing many of these requirements. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This study adapts from established research frameworks to structure the current state of research on the integration of SOA, BPM and BRM. The authors highlight the current research scope, point to disregarded topics and sketch out multidisciplinary research approaches.
Findings
While the three concepts are often discussed only in isolation or pairwise, approaches that integrate them are scarce. Against this backdrop, this study defines three types of research opportunities and identifies several directions for future research that should be explored from a technological as well as organizational perspective. Given the breadth of open questions, the authors present sources for each area of our research framework, which can serve as starting points for future investigations.
Practical implications
Except for well-established support for separate tasks and technologies, there is a lack of integrated standards, methods and platforms, which for example enable integrated decision-making across BPM and SOA.
Originality/value
Our contribution builds on established frameworks and clearly shows that the discussion on the integration of SOA, BPM and BRM cannot yet be regarded as sufficient. The research agenda highlights which areas explicitly benefit from a more precise consideration.
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Keywords
Christoph Klima, Florian Pfarr and Axel Winkelmann
New teaching concepts in IS are highly relevant to deliver practical skills to IS students, as demanded by business practice. There are different approaches for providing…
Abstract
Purpose
New teaching concepts in IS are highly relevant to deliver practical skills to IS students, as demanded by business practice. There are different approaches for providing knowledge. The authors differentiate between teacher-centered and learner-centered approaches when designing new IS courses. The latter is characterized by creating learning environments, where students work on a solution for a given problem. Since nearly every company integrates its processes in enterprise systems, the authors consider the teaching of ERP as particularly relevant for business practice. Hence, the authors present the design of an ERP laboratory-based master IS courses to deliver practical and technical system knowledge. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The main research methods to achieve the research goals are aligned with a design science approach. For evaluation, data were gathered by a questionnaire-based survey.
Findings
The authors benchmarked different issues in both classes and finally came to the conclusion that learner-centered approaches on the one hand are characterized by a lot more effort for students but on the other hand lead to a deeper understanding of a topic area and additionally boost class attendance.
Originality/value
Thus, this paper presents new possibilities for delivering practical and technical skills to IS master students, which is important to IS teachers, faculties and also practitioners.
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Philipp Bergener, Patrick Delfmann, Burkhard Weiss and Axel Winkelmann
Automating the task of identifying process weaknesses using process models is promising, as many organizations have to manage a large amount of process models. The purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
Automating the task of identifying process weaknesses using process models is promising, as many organizations have to manage a large amount of process models. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pattern-based approach for automatically detecting potential process weaknesses in semantic process models, thus supporting the task of business process improvement.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on design research, combined with a case study, the authors explore the design, application and evaluation of a pattern-based process weakness detection approach within the setting of a real-life case study in a German bank.
Findings
Business process weakness detection can be automated to a remarkable extent using pattern matching and a semantic business process modeling language. A case study provided evidence that such an approach highly supports business process analysts.
Research limitations/implications
The presented approach is limited by the fact that not every potential process weakness detected by pattern matching is really a weakness but just gives the impression to be one. Hence, after detecting a weakness, analysts still have to decide on its authenticity.
Practical implications
Applying weakness patterns to semantic process models via pattern matching allows organizations to automatically and efficiently identify process improvement potentials. Hence, this research helps to avoid time- and resource-consuming manual analysis of process model landscapes.
Originality/value
The approach is not restricted to a single modeling language. Furthermore, by applying the pattern matching approach to a semantic modeling language, the authors avoid ambiguous search results. A case study proves the usefulness of the approach.
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Axel Winkelmann and Burkhard Weiß
Financial institutions have been engaged in numerous business process reengineering (BPR) projects to make their organizations more efficient. However, the success of BPR projects…
Abstract
Purpose
Financial institutions have been engaged in numerous business process reengineering (BPR) projects to make their organizations more efficient. However, the success of BPR projects in banks varies significantly and it remains a challenge to systematically discover weaknesses in business process landscapes. Based on the flow chart notation language this paper seeks to argue for the definition of weakness patterns in order to automatically identify potential process weaknesses.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors developed weakness patterns in the flow chart notation language based on design science principles. To systematically derive process weaknesses that can be formalized, they analyzed each element of the flow chart notation as it was used in a real‐life case. They furthermore tested the identified patterns in reality in order to evaluate their validity.
Findings
The authors identified various potential weakness patterns that helped in automatically identifying weaknesses in process models. To some extent these findings are generalizable and transferable to other process modeling languages.
Research limitations/implications
The pattern‐based approach depends upon how well structural weakness patterns are defined and formalized. Identified problems remain “potential” weaknesses until a manual analysis reveals that the identified potential weaknesses are actually real weaknesses or not, e.g. due to law regulations.
Practical implications
Using weakness patterns allows for automatically identifying potential process weaknesses in existing flow chart models. This way, this research helps in improving the so far manual analysis of process model landscapes.
Originality/value
The approach is a new way of looking for process weaknesses through process weakness patterns.