Abstract
Business process management has long been a topic of great interest in operations management research. Early research on business process management focuses on workflow analysis and process optimization. These types of research evaluate and analyze a predefined set of procedures from a process perspective. That said, with a list of activities, constraints and criteria, the procedural workflow are specified and examined. Then, process analysts come up with suggestions to optimize the process and speed up the workflow. Research findings are widely applied in production and logistics; however, some works are criticized as being too rigid and only suitable for a stable business environment (Burns, 1993). The article describes an architecture approach for business process management, and is organized as follows: first, we review the literature on architecture. Next, we outline a de facto standard for the architecture approach, and highlight the strength of using an architecture approach. Finally, we describe future trends, and conclude the article.
TopBackground
The goal of personalization is to endow software systems with the capability to change (adapt) aspects of their functionality, appearance or both at runtime to the particularities of users to better suit their needs. The recent rapid advances in storage and communication technologies stress the need for personalization. This need is more evident in consumer-oriented fields, like news content personalization systems, recommendation systems, user interfaces, and applications like home audiovisual material collection and organization, search engines in multimedia browsing and retrieval systems, providing services for personalized presentation of interactive video content. Among these applications, some are Web-based, but there are also versions for PDAs and mobile devices (Tuoriniemi & Parkkinen, 2007) and mobile devices.
In this article, current approaches of user modeling and user profile representation are discussed, and then the focus is on methods for automatic learning of user models and profiles. The presented learning approaches cover a wide range of machine learning (vector-based or probabilistic) methods and also extend to support the most recent advances in personalization systems such as collaborative filtering, ontology-based user modeling and user social context.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Process Architecture: It is the structural design of general process systems and covers process design, logistics, policy and procedures. The overall inputs, outputs and functionality of the process architecture are also specified.
Business Architecture: It structures the accountability over business strategies and activities prior to any further effort to structure individual aspects.
Enterprise Architecture: It is a specific type of architecture and can be considered to be the description and documentation of the current and desired information and technology environment, and its relationship to processes and business strategy.
Business Process: A business process is defined as a set of related, structured activities, or a chain of events, that produces a specific outcome for a particular user or users. This set of activities is in pursuit of a common goal.
Technical architecture: It refers to hardware and software architecture.
Blueprint: It is a document to detail how the design is to be divided into individual functional components and the way in which these components are to interact to provide the overall functionality.
Zachman Framework: It is a tool supporting enterprise architecture, and was developed by John Zachman.