2016, Sanne, Ulf, Ferrari, Alessio, Gnesi, Stefania, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Ana, Fred, Aveiro, David

In many organisations, business process (BP) descriptions are available in the form of written procedures, or operational manuals. These documents are expressed in informal natural language, which is inherently open to different interpretations. Hence, the content of these documents might be incorrectly interpreted by those who have to put the process into practice. It is therefore important to identify language defects in written BP descriptions, to ensure that BPs are properly carried out. Among the potential defects, one of the most relevant for BPs is the absence of clear actors in action-related sentences. Indeed, an unclear actor might lead to a missing responsibility, and, in turn, to activities that are never performed. This paper aims at identifying unclear actors in BP descriptions expressed in natural language. To this end, we define an algorithm named ABIDE, which leverages rule-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We evaluate the algorithm on a manually annotated data-set of 20 real-world BP descriptions (1,029 sentences). ABIDE achieves a recall of 87%, and a precision of 56%. We consider these results promising. Improvements of the algorithm are also discussed in the paper.

2016, Emmenegger, Sandro, Thönssen, Barbara, Hinkelmann, Knut, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Ana, Fred, Aveiro, David

Enterprises and Public Administrations alike need to ensure that newly hired employees are able to learn the ropes fast. Employers also need to support continuous workplace learning. Work-place learning should be strongly related to business goals and thus, learning goals should direct-ly add to business goals. To measure achievement of both learning and business goals we pro-pose augmented Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In our research we applied model driven engineering. Hence we developed a model for a Learning Scorecard comprising of business and learning goals and their KPIs represented in an ontology. KPI performance values and scores are calculated with formal rules based on the SPARQL Inferencing Notation. Results are presented in a dashboard on an individual level as well as on a team/group level. Requirements, goals and KPIs as well as performance measurement were defined in close co-operation with Marche Region, business partner in Learn PAd.