2016, Hinkelmann, Knut

Organizations act in highly competitive markets, which forces them to be flexible. Constantly changing business requirements require flexible business processes. Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) supports modeling run-time flexibility of partially structured business process models, but does not fully specify the control flow. Objective: The goal is to develop a planning algorithm that supports the case worker in planning case-based business processes at run-time. Method: We identify the requirements of run-time planning of partly structured processes by analyzing the admission process for the master degree at FHNW. To plan the process instance, we develop a planning algorithm. Our planning algorithm is evaluated using concrete cases provided by FHNW in order to demonstrate real application. Results: The planning algorithm reflects the requirements for serializing tasks at run-time. Conclusion: Our planning algorithm allows to automatically deriving context-specific execution plans for CMMN models at run-time.

2014-08, Hinkelmann, Knut

In this study, the literature on strategic alignment, strategy modeling and infrastructure architecture modeling has been analyzed and a prototype has been developed for modeling business strategy and IT strategy as well as the relationship between. This modeling technique allows improving the business and IT alignment based on the Strategic Alignment Model of Henderson and Venkatraman. The modeling language is an extension and adaptation of the Business Motivation Model of OMG. The elements, which constitute the overall strategy, can belong to a business view, an IT view or to both. Due to this feature, it is possible to visualize the IT view (IT strategy) or the business view (business strategy) of the generic strategy separately. A concrete example shows how a strategy may be developed.

2012, Hinkelmann, Knut

This work presents a new approach to handling knowledge-intensive business processes in an adaptive, flexible and accurate way. We propose to support processes by executing a process skeleton, consisting of the most important recurring activities of the process, through a workflow engine. This skeleton should be kept simple. The corresponding workflow is complemented by two features: firstly, a task management tool through which workflow tasks are delivered and that give human executors flexibility and freedom to adapt tasks by adding subtasks and resources as required by the context. And secondly, a component that learns business rules from the log files of this task management and that will predict subtasks and resources on the basis of knowledge from previous executions. We present supervised and unsupervised approaches for rule learning and evaluate both on a real business process with 61 instances. Results are promising, showing that meaningful rules can be learned even from this comparatively small data set.

2016, Hinkelmann, Knut

This paper introduces the project idea of Business Processes as a Services (BPaaS) that is worked out in the H2020 project CloudSocket. Concept models and semantics are used to align domain specific business processes with executable workflows that are deployed and in production in a multi-cloud environment. The Business Process Management System Paradigm (BPMS) is requesting the functional capabilities of the so-called BPaaS Environments (i) design, (ii) allocation, (iii) execution and (iv) evaluation, which technically compose the CloudSocket Broker platform. This paper introduces first findings of aligning customers’ business needs with BPaaS cloud offerings using a model-based approach.

2014, Hinkelmann, Knut

2011, Hinkelmann, Knut

This paper discusses the application and evaluation of the multidimensional knowledge framework approach on a real life case study. In a first stage the framework is explained and the case study where the framework is assessed is described. At the end it is evaluated if the framework helps to identify strengths and weaknesses which can be exploited to improve knowledge maturing in an organisation.

2016, Hinkelmann, Knut

This chapter describes the Knowledge Work Designer, a modelling method for knowledge work. It is based on two principles: (1) the separation of business logic and process logic and (2) the support of both structures and unstructured knowledge. Process logic can be represented in a structured way in BPMN and in a non-structured way with CMMN. For real processes there is no strict separation between structured processes and cases. Therefore the Knowledge Work Designer offers a deep integration of BPMN and CMMN. Business logic can be represented in a structured way using decision tables. Unstructured business logic can be represented in documents. The separation of business logic and process logic allows for simpler process model and easier maintenance.

2013-11, Hinkelmann, Knut

In this paper we show how semantic metadata – derived from the enterprise architecture description - can improve both the exploitation of information in the operative business and the continuous alignment of information systems with the business. ArchiMEO, a formal representation of the ArchiMate framework, was applied to model selected parts of a large Swiss company, including metadata of concrete information objects stored in various applications. The evaluation of our approach clearly gave evidence that linking an enterprise ontology with operational databases is beneficiary: it provides an integrated view and management of enterprise entities spread over various data stores, represented in different ways and levels of granularity. Furthermore, because of its inference capabilities, when used as metadata encoding scheme an enterprise ontology can provide context-sensitive access to relevant information.

2010-01-04T00:00:00Z, Hinkelmann, Knut