Promoting Business Process Management Excellence in Russia

39
5.3 Business Process Modeling
In the area of Business Process Modeling, the breakout session started with two presentations.
First Prof. Dr. Erich Ortner (Technum) introduced the concept of resilience as a new paradigm
for engineering and management of an enterprise. This approach emphasizes the prolonged
need to maintain responsive towards change going on in the environment of an organization.
Second, Prof. Dr. Peter Loos (University of Saarbrücken) presented an approach for identifying
and designing successful business process models based on constructing reference models in
an inductive way. As opposed to a deductive development based on theory, inductive development
is conducted by analyzing business process instances in the field, from which best practice
knowledge about the process is built. Recent contributions in process mining can provide for the
required functionality towards that end.
In the discussion, a collection of emerging areas for cooperation with regards to research, industry,
and teaching in the area of business process modeling was identified. We report on them
separately in the following subsections.
With respect to industry, the concept of resilience was debated further. It was stated that maintaining
responsive towards change in the environment requires companies to build up competences
and resources in excess of what is needed for performing the daily operations in a company.
Since building up these resources is a costly endeavor, companies have to determine the desired
degree of resilience that is needed. First of all, they need to develop mechanisms to detect what
is actually going on in their environment. This can be done with business process analysis techniques
such as process mining, as long as sufficiently large and rich data repositories are in place
to allow for drawing sound conclusions. A subcategory of methods is to build up reference models
from business process instances with which new business processes can be compared in order to
detect possible changes in the environment. Such reference models would need to be build up for
different industry sectors in order to document best practice knowledge on business processes.
On the other hand, adapting reference models does not come for free, since companies striving
to implement reference models into their own organization have to carry out resource-intensive
adaptation processes in order to make this knowledge applicable to their own organization.
With respect to research, it was stated that a plethora of reference models exists, covering difference
industry sectors (such as manufacturing, supply chain integration, retail, insurance) and
business process types (such as order-to-cash processes, materials planning, invoicing). However,
most of these models have been developed from scratch without a clear reference to real-life
business processes. An automatic design of new reference models that is based on business process
mining can add another valuable perspective that is intimately rooted in analyzing real-life
process data. However, such analyses are restrictive since they require high quality data to be in
place that can be analyzed in a meaningful way. This process might be supported by developing
or revising reference models in a collaborative effort of researchers, such as performed in the
Open Model Initiative (http://openmodels.org/). After a reference model is developed, it might
be subjected to further testing in the field in order to underline a goodness of fit with data gathered
from business process instances. To that end, inductive and deductive strategies for developing
reference models complement each other and might help to develop more elaborate reference
models in the future. Another promising area for research on business process modeling is to
further develop business processes for networking organizations with each other and with end
consumers. Examples are coordination patterns, a collaborative design of reference models, and
the standardization of business processes and their interfaces in order to be able to orchestrate
them in interorganizational settings.
With regards to BPM education, the break out session revealed that BPM education in Russia
has a history of focusing on humanitarian topics, whereas BPM education in Germany was developed
in the course of business process reengineering in companies in the mid nineteen nineties.
Further prospects with regards to BPM education are to improve students’ skills regarding mod-