In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to address these challenges. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since organizations tend to have a huge number of such models, analysis techniques are required that ensure the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. The goal of this doctoral thesis is the development of model refactoring techniques by integrating and applying concepts from the three main branches of theoretical linguistics: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The syntactical refactoring technique addresses linguistic issues that arise by expressing process behavior with natural language. The semantic refactoring technique reworks terminology with overlapping and synonymous meaning. The pragmatic refactoring technique provides recommendations for incompletely specified process models. All of the presented techniques have been evaluated with real-world process model repositories from various industries to demonstrate their applicability and efficiency.

Natural language is one of the most important means of human communication. It enables us to express our will, to exchange thoughts and to document our knowledge in written sources. Owing to its substantial role in many facets of human life, technology for automatically analyzing and processing natural language has recently become increasingly important. In fact, natural language processing tools have paved the way for entirely new business opportunities. The goal of this book is to facilitate the automatic analysis of natural language in process models and to employ this analysis for assisting process model stakeholders. Therefore, a technique is defined that automatically recognizes and annotates process model element labels. In addition, this technique is leveraged to support organizations in effectively utilizing their process models in various ways. The book is organized into seven chapters. It starts with an overview of business process management and linguistics and continues with conceptual contributions on parsing and annotating process model elements, with the detection and correction of process model guideline violations, with the generation of natural language from process models and finally ends with the derivation of service candidates from process models.

This book covers the whole spectrum of modeling goals to achieve optimal quality in the process model developed. It focuses on how to balance quality considerations across all semiotic levels when models are used for different purposes, and is based on SEQUAL, a framework for understanding the quality of models and modeling languages, which can take into account all main aspects relating to the quality of models. Chapter 1 focuses on the theoretical foundations, introducing readers to the topics of business processes and business process modeling, as well as the most important concept underlying the modeling of business processes. In turn, Chapter 2 addresses the quality of models in general and business process models in particular. Chapter 3 contains a specialization of SEQUAL for quality of business process models. In Chapter 4, examples of the practical uses of business process models are provided, together with the results of detailed case studies on how to achieve and maintain quality in business process models. Chapter 5 presents a process modeling value framework that demonstrates how to achieve more long-term and higher return on investment with regard to (business) process and enterprise models. Lastly, Chapter 6 reviews the main points of the book and discusses the potential for business process modeling in the future through its combination with other types of modeling. The book has two intended audiences. It is primarily intended for computer science, software engineering and information system students at the postgraduate level who want to know more about business process modeling and the quality of models in preparation for professional practice. The second audience consists of professionals with extensive experience in and responsibilities related to the development and evolution of process-oriented information systems and information systems methodologies in general, who need to formalize and structure their practical experience or update their knowledge as a way to improve their professional activity. The book also includes a number of real-world case studies that make it easier to grasp the main theoretical concepts, helping readers apply the approaches described.

Corporations accumulate a lot of valuable data and knowledge over time, but storing and maintaining this data can be a logistic and financial headache for business leaders and IT specialists. Uncovering Essential Software Artifacts through Business Process Archaeology introduces an emerging method of software modernization used to effectively manage legacy systems and company operations supported by such systems. This book presents methods, techniques, and new trends on business process archeology as well as some industrial success stories. Business experts, professionals, and researchers working in the field of information and knowledge management will use this reference source to efficiently and effectively implement and utilize business knowledge.

th The 15 International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB 2010) took place during June 23–25 in Cardiff (UK). Since the first edition in 1995, the NLDB conference has been aiming at bringing together resear- ers, people working in industry and potential users interested in various applications of natural language in the database and information system area. However, in order to reflect the growing importance of accessing information from a diverse collection of sources (Web, Databases, Sensors, Cloud) in an equally wide range of contexts (- cluding mobile and tethered), the theme of the 15th International Conference on - plications of Natural Language to Information Systems 2010 was "Communicating with Anything, Anywhere in Natural Language. " Natural languages and databases are core components in the development of inf- mation systems. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques may substantially enhance most phases of the information system lifecycle, starting with requirement analysis, specification and validation, and going up to conflict resolution, result pr- essing and presentation. Furthermore, natural language-based query languages and user interfaces facilitate the access to information for all and allow for new paradigms in the usage of computerized services. Hot topics such as information retrieval (IR), software engineering applications, hidden Markov models, natural language interfaces and semantic networks and graphs imply a complete fusion of databases, IR and NLP techniques.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support, BPMDS 2016, and the 21st International Conference on Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Design, EMMSAD 2016, held together with the 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2016) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June 2016. The focus theme for BPMDS 2016 papers was ”Business Processes in a Connected World”, for which three subthemes were identified: business processes for connecting people, connecting intelligent objects to business processes and connecting information/data/knowledge to business processes. The 17 full and 1 short paper accepted for BPMDS were selected from 48 submissions and are grouped into topical sections on process execution support; improving usability of process models; social and human perspectives; new directions in process modeling; consistency, correctness and compliance; process and data mining; and process variability. The intention of EMMSAD is to solicit papers related to the field of information systems analysis and design including numerous information modeling methods and notations that are typically evolving. These ongoing changes significantly impact the way information systems, enterprises, and business processes are being analyzed and designed in practice. The 12 full papers accepted for EMMSAD were chosen from 19 submissions and are grouped into topical sections on fundamental issues in modeling; requirements and regulations; enterprise and software ecosystem modeling; information and process model quality; meta-modeling and domain specific modeling and model composition; and modeling of architecture and design.

This book brings together experts from research and practice. It includes the design of innovative Robot Process Automation (RPA) concepts, the discussion of related research fields (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, AI), the evaluation of existing software products, and findings from real-life implementation projects. Similar to the substitution of physical work in manufacturing (blue collar automation), Robotic Process Automation tries to substitute intellectual work in office and administration processes with software robots (white-collar automation). The starting point for the development of RPA was the observation that – despite the use of process-oriented enterprise systems (such as ERP, CRM and BPM systems) – additional manual activities are still indispensable today. In the RPA approach, these manual activities are learned and automated by software robots, either by defining rules or by observing manual activities. RPA is related to business process management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Tools for RPA originated from dedicated stand-alone software. Today, RPA functionalities are also integrated into elaborated process management suites. From a conceptual perspective, RPA can be structured into input components (sensors in the wide sense), an intelligence center, and output components (actuators in the wide sense). From a strategic perspective, the impact of RPA can be related to the support of existing tasks, the complete substitution of human activities, and the innovation of processes as well as business models. At present, high expectations are related to the use of RPA in the improvement of software-supported business processes. Manual activities are learned and automated by software robots that interact with existing applications via the presentation layer. In combination with artificial intelligence (AI) as well as innovative interfaces (e. g., voice recognition) RPA creates a novel level of automation for office and administration processes. Its benefit potential reaches a return on investment (ROI) up-to 800% that is documented in various case studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of ten international workshops held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2014, in September 2014. The ten workshops comprised Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth 2014), Security in Business Processes (SBP 2014), Process Model Collections: Management and Reuse (PMC-MR 2014), Business Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems (BPCAS 2014), Data- and Artifact-centric BPM (DAB 2014), Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2014), Business Process Management in the Cloud (BPMC 2014), Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TaProViz 2014), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2014) and Decision Mining and Modeling for Business Processes (DeMiMoP 2014). The 38 revised full and eight short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. In addition, six short papers resulting from the Doctoral Consortium at BPM 2014 are included in this book.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 5th IFIP WG 2.6 International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis, SIMPDA 2015, held in Vienna, Austria in December 2015. The 8 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. They cover theoretical issues related to process representation, discovery and analysis, or provide practical and operational experiences in process discovery and analysis. They focus mainly on the adoption of process mining algorithms in conjunction and coordination with other techniques and methodologies.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology, DESRIST 2017, held in May/June 2017 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The 25 full and 11 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 full and 19 short papers. The contributions are organized in topical sections named: DSR in business process management; DSR in human computer interaction; DSR in data science and business analytics; DSR in service science; methodological contributions; domain-specific DSR applications; emerging themes and new ideas; and products and prototypes.