Special Issue On Drivers of Business Process Development: Business, IT, Compliance

Guest Editors
Selmin Nurcan
Rainer Schmidt
Pnina Soffer
Roland Ukor

Introduction

New business processes are created and existing ones evolve following different kinds of drivers or motivations. Business process life-cycle can be roughly seen as a succession of improvement cycles which include the design, deployment and operation-evaluation phases. This special issue will be devoted to the drivers of these phases and to their transitions, as well as how they can be accommodated into a broader and dynamic view of the business process life-cycle. The research question will be what "drives" the wheel (the business process life cycle) when it turns to reach a moving business target with regard to market changes and continuous improvement requirements.

Objective of the Special Issue

The Special Issue on Drivers of Business Process Development: Business, IT, Compliance follows the 10th Workshop on Business Process Modeling, Development, and Support, organized in conjunction with CAISE’09, and gives room for other high quality papers. The special issue is targeted at both researchers and practitioners of the information systems (in the broad sense) community in the fields of business process development and business application software development. Among the drivers of business process development, we distinguish between three groups, which can exist separately or in any combination in real life situations.

First, business objectives and goals drive the creation and evolution of business processes. Evolution of business processes can be driven by attempts to improve the achievement of business objectives (based on their measurement), or by the need to adapt to changes in these objectives. Research issues related to business drivers include their systematic identification, integration into process design and evolution, performance measurement, and others.

Second, the availability of new IT systems (any kind of components-of-the-shelf) can drive both the creation and the evolution of business processes. The introduction of new information systems can enforce, enable or require the design of new business process; new possibilities of business process management or assessment can drive the evolution of the processes. Research issues related to IT drivers include business process-IT alignment, process mining and others.

Third, the need to comply with external standards and regulations may drive the creation of new business processes and the evolution of existing ones. Research issues related to compliance drivers include constrained process design, compliance assurance and verification, and others. There may be other drivers that do not fall in any of these categories, and they are of interest to the Special issue as well.

Recommended Topics