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Workflow and Process Management (WPM)

Workflow and Process Management (WPM). David Ding Management Department David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. Agenda. Research Commentary: Workflow Management Issues in e-Business

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Workflow and Process Management (WPM)

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  1. Workflow and Process Management (WPM) David Ding Management Department David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah

  2. Agenda Research Commentary: Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models: Probabilistic and Algorithmic Approaches Tools for Inventing Organizations: Towards a Handbook of Organizational Process Dynamic Routing and Operational Controls in Workflow Management Systems

  3. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Traditional industry based Information-based (Tangible goods) ( Information flow through the value chain)

  4. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Purpose 1st. Provide a perspective for workflow management. 2nd. Identify promising directions for future research. Framework and road map Inter

  5. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Intraorganizational Workflows 3 views of workflows management (general to specific) • Tasks executed by various resources in a value system • Automation of business process, information transferred • Characteristics of Predictability, Repeatable, Distributed, Automation, Idling.

  6. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Specification and Modeling Workflow Components: Process model, task, work case, resource, role, data elements, state information, and constraints Specification Key issues: Task definition, task coordination, correctness of execution requirements. Modeling Approach: Petri.nets, ICN(Information Control Nets, ActionWorkflow formalism, 200 products on the markets are implementing various models due to the diversity of above approach to modeling

  7. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Q: How to translate between models ? S: A unifying model that can integrate heterogeneous models

  8. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Organizational Modeling of Workflows Organizational awareness is required for a fit between work practice and the model/mechanism used by the workflow management system. Or integration of workflow models with organizational models Organization Model: Represents a logical hierarchy of roles that performed in the organization. Reflects organization structure, include separation of duties, and integrate work on delegation with security.

  9. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Workflow Analysis, monitoring and control Structural analysis: Analyze the structure of processes and workflows during the design phase. Comprised of Validation: Test semantic completeness for predicting workflows in all scenarios, by interactive simulation Verification: Establish the syntactic correctness and eliminate redundancies, by checking for correctness Data usage analysis: Analyze patterns of data, prevent errors, by introducing the notion of transactions Gap: Verifying the context of workflows is required

  10. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Distributed and Interorganizational Workflows • Multiple, Widely spread locations for single process • Incompatibility of workflows systems • Multiple organizational units for single process Petri-nets Introduce a mechanism to transfer data across the boundary

  11. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Distributed and Interorganizational Workflows Restructuring workflow in distributed settings Q: Inconsistency and duplication for lacking of transparency across or boundaries S: Mapping disparate workflow models into one another Q: Task is delegated dynamically S: Dynamically allocation of tasks to servers

  12. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business • Workflow issues in e-Business 1st. Integrating ERP Applications with Supply Chains • Q 1: Design and optimization of e - supply chain • Develop analytical tools for verification and validation of composite workflows • Q2: How to Workflow-enable existing ERP ERP: transaction driven, structured data Workflow: process based, unstructured data

  13. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Workflow issues in e-Business 2nd. B2B Exchanges and e-Hubs • Q3: Design of a distribution channel based on e-hub • Work out the details of information flows between various entities and the data structures for the shared information • Q4: Mapping information and rules correctly • Develop techniques for ensuring semantic integrity of the information and rules for mapping correctly • Q5: Build complex workflows using B-2-B exchange

  14. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business Workflow issues in e-Business 3rd. E-Service Composition Q6: Define the composition of plug-and-play services Q7: Make sure the individual services interact with each other Q7: Design better metamodels and build interface with intelligent systems to accommodate exception to normal conditions Q8: Develop a comprehensive model to standardize e-Business

  15. Workflow Management Issues in e-Business • Contribution • Identify promising areas for further research • Specification of interorganizational workflow; • Design of better organizational metamodel; • Support for exception; • Development of standards to facilitate interorganizational e-commerce

  16. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models: Probabilistic and Algorithmic Approaches Assumption Discussion

  17. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models CLUE Q:Previous works on BPR and WM assume that AS-IS process models are known prior to reengineering. Gap: AS-IS process models are very difficult to extract S: A number of algorithms are postulated to discover, and come up with models of AS-IS business processes. Such methods have been implemented as tools which can automatically extract AS-IS process models. Traces of process behavior are recorded and a formal model of the process that account for the behavior is extracted.

  18. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models BP components Agent, event, activity, state, process activity graph(PAG), and process path. Fig 1. Process Activity Graph (PAG): Process PUS Monitor S2, technician S3.

  19. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models • Non-trivial • PAG represents the activity flows of a BP model, and is a critical component of BP model. • Given a PAG for a process, control flow in the process will be able to be identified. Basic intuition • Experience and record a process by keeping a log of the events. • Frequently recur patterns present true process behavior. • Probabilistic and algorithmic strategies in Finite State Machine (FSM) are applied to extract PAGs from organizational behavior traces.

  20. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Probabilistic Strategy Examine the activity stream of a BP, use stochastic process modeling techniques to find the most probable activity sequence. 1st. The nth order activity-sequence probability matrix is constructed 2nd. The activity graph (AG) is drawn from the probability matrix 3rd. Repetitive edges in AG are eliminated and all the remaining edges are newly and uniquely labeled 4th. AG is converted into it dual, AG’ 5th. AG’ is converted into the final Process Activity Graph for the BP by taking away illegal edges

  21. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Probabilistic Strategy Example Example: Reserve Equipment (ResEqp) Get-E-Request(P), Check-E-Available(Q), Reserve-E(R), Check-E-Unavailable(S), Waitlist-E-Request(T)

  22. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Probabilistic Strategy Example 1st. The nth order activity-sequence probability matrix Column: 2-activity sequence; Row: activities Number: probabilities of each future activity occurrence after each 2-activity sequence. N: length of the history choosing to characterize futures

  23. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Probabilistic Strategy Example 2nd. The activity graph (AG) is drawn from the probability matrix by setting threshold probability 3rd. Repetitive edges in AG are eliminated

  24. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Probabilistic Strategy Example 4th. AG is converted into it dual, AG’ S1 to S11 correspond to each edge in AG

  25. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Probabilistic Strategy Example 5th. AG’ is converted into the final Process Activity Graph for the BP by taking away illegal edges

  26. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models The Algorithmic Strategy Extract a model of BP process algorithmically from a sample. B-F algorithm: Any state of a process is defined by what future behaviors can occur from it. Equivalence Classes: Two histories belong to same equivalence level if they have the same future identity.

  27. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models B-F(k) Algorithm Define a set of equivalence classes that represent the status of the resultant PAG for the process. Merge-state: merge states have same output activities.

  28. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models B-F(k,c) Algorithm C: Confidence factor as a threshold for histories.

  29. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models Comparison among three Strategies Metric 1: Number of correct process paths created Metric 2: Number of incorrect process generated Metric 3: Number of states exist in the final PAG. Results: Probabilistic Model: 11 states, noisy sequence (partially avoided with threshold probability factor) B-F(k) Strategy: 8 states, noisy sequence (semantically correct) The B-F(K,c) Strategy: 7 states, avoid redundant and loops and paths that do not occur frequently enough in the activity stream.

  30. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models Case Study Provide Computer Support (PCS) 1st. Extract a process model of this BP by conventional model. 2nd. Extract PAGs for the BP using each of the three strategies. Comparison 1. Probabilistic Strategy 21 states, captures all the repeated sequences in AS1 Redundancy without merge

  31. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models Case Study 2. B-F(k) PAG 19 states, same paths as 1 Single activity stream, missing sequence or paths 3. B-F(k,c) PAG 23 states, captures more paths and A-B-D-G-I-Q-R, merge for minimal states to capture possible paths, consequence factor for equally probable futures.Closet and most complete PAG of a given process

  32. Automating the Discovery of AS-IS Business Process Models Contribution Practical: Postulates a number of systematic procedures to extract AS-IS process model. Theoretical: Recognize the commonality between grammar discovery problem and the BP discovery problem. First to look at automating BP discovery. Future work Pursue ways of refining algorithms to discover control flows

  33. Tools for Inventing Organizations: Towards a Handbook of Organizational Process OUTLINE Gap: Need to innovate but lack the tool for doing so. A novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management is proposed. Goal: Provide a “proof of concept” that such a handbook are both technically feasible and managerially useful.

  34. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Challenge • How to recognize and represent organizational processes? • Flow charts and data-flow diagrams, Petri nets, and goal-based model • How to do this better? • Analyzing and representing process with representation of similarity • Notions of specialization of processes • Managing dependencies

  35. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Specialization of Processes • Breaking a process into different parts • Differentiating a process into its different types • Activities be arranged into an interconnected 2D network Sell how?

  36. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook Bundles Alternative specializations are comparable in same bundle Sell what? Sell how?

  37. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Dependencies and Coordination • Coordination defined as managing dependencies among activities • Ubiquitous and variable coordination processes offer special leverage for redesigning processes. Three dependencies among activities Dependencies and coordination mechanism for managing them

  38. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Specialization and Decomposition of Dependencies • Some dependencies are specializations or being composed of others • Managing three dependencies amounts to having • Right Thing, at • Right Time, and in • Right Place. • Each dependencies has different processes for managing it

  39. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Related works • Organization Theory and Design • Classification, identifying alternatives, improvements • Importance of coordination in organizational design • Useful ways of organizing knowledge • Computer Science • Process Handbook uses both process specialization and dependencies with coordination mechanisms to generate and organize examples • Goal difference: Build systems to help people design and carry out processes, or support human-decision-makers

  40. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook Discussion Build computer systems to help people design and carry out processes Build computer systems and use them to design and carry out process VS

  41. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Process Handbook • VB based • Web user Interfaced (activities description, links, views of specializations and decompositions, automated support for inheritance and dependencies) • Information Contended (examples from organizations and generic business processes) • “Top down” and “bottom up” structured

  42. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Process Handbook Example • Firm A • Experiencing problems with hiring process, who have invested into “as is” process analysis using conventional techniques. • Specification enables richer ways of indexing example pools • Analyzing hiring process from a coordination point of view, quickly identifying ways for managing the sharing dependency • “Passed through a doorway where all sorts of things that have never imagined before now seemed possible. ”

  43. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Discussion • Advantages • 1st. Using a specialization hierarchy in combination with explicitly representation of coordination and dependencies, supports a rapid assessment of basic features of a process • 2nd. The specialization hierarchy provided a powerful framework for generating new process ideas • 3rd. “Process-oriented” , distinguish process with organizational structure or roles of particular people. • Identifying new ways of doing old tasks and managing connected process that span organizational boundaries

  44. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Discussion • Disadvantages • 1st. Statistic process representation is more stable and routine than most business process actually are, • 2nd. Explicitly representations of process will be interpreted by subjected too rigidly, should be a source.

  45. Tools for Inventing Organizations: A Handbook • Contribution • Take advantage of human abilities to analyze, organize, and communicate knowledge • Approach depends on the quality and amount of human intelligence applied to the problem of generating and organizing knowledge in the system • The Handbook has an advantage over more formal approaches with allowing multiple alternatives coexist in the system.

  46. Time for BREAK!

  47. Dynamic Routing and Operational Controls in Workflow Management Systems OUTLINE Gap: A need to address the authorization, control issues, and handle exceptions in WMS. Goal: Develop a framework for managing workflows in an efficient and orderly manner with maximal degrees of flexibility.

  48. Dynamic Routing and Operational Controls • Framework Conceptions • Document, worker, role, task. • Field: Data element contained in a document that has a numerical or symbolic value • Work basket: A stack of documents waiting to be processed • Sequence dependency: Two tasks that must be performed by different roles in a given sequence create a sequence dependency

  49. Dynamic Routing and Operational Controls • System Architecture • Control table for integrity: • (specific operations for a given role) Restriction on the kinds of operation • Sequence constraints for proper routing: • Impose dependencies between tasks • Event-based rules for additional controls and exceptions: • Trigger special actions to tale place

  50. Dynamic Routing and Operational Controls • Framework Con’d • Work flow tables: specify authorizations for access; • Sequence constraints: specify order for access, which override work flow table; • Event-based rules: supersede above two and represents a more sophisticated means of managing the workflow and handling special situations.

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