Abstract
Business Process Management (BPM) brings together the idea of effectively managing organizations and properly using Information Technology to fulfill organizations’ needs. For this purpose, BPM systems are largely used nowadays. However, most process models are started from scratch, not having reuse promoted. Sometimes, large enterprises have the same business process implemented in a variety of ways due to differences in their departmental cultures or environments, even when using a unique integrated system. Additionally, although technology plays an important role in actually improving organizations, the human factor is still fundamental, since any improvement attempt goes through cultural changes. In this chapter, a peer-to-peer (P2P) tool is proposed as a way to cooperatively develop business processes models, minimizing the time needed to develop such models, reducing the differences among similar processes conducted in distinct organizational units, enhancing the quality of models, promoting reuse, and distributing knowledge.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Model Reuse: Total or partial use of a model in the construction of a new model.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P): A computational network application in which each node is autonomously managed and can contribute with its computational resources to the distributed execution of tasks requested by other system nodes.
Business Process Management (BPM): Activities performed by organizations to manage and continually improve their business processes.
Distributed System: A system where different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.
Communities of Practice (CoP): Groups of individuals sharing information, ideas, or experiences on a common domain.
Collaborative Filtering: The process of recommending of information based on the analysis of the similarity between the opinions of one user and a group of users in a system.
Reputation System: A type of collaborative filtering algorithm which attempts to determine ratings for a collection of entities, given a collection of opinions that those entities hold about each other.
Knowledge Management (KM): A range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organizations; also referred to as organizational learning or organizational intelligence.