G. Koliadis, A. Ghose. Risk-Aware Organizational Design.  Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Governance, Risk and Compliance – Applications for Information Systems (GRCIS’09), 2009.

Operational risk is an important, complex, and difficult, criterion to consider during any form of organizational decision making.  In practice (1) complexity typically arises from: the use of a variety of risk related indicators; the use of multiple heterogeneous measurement scales; measurement uncertainty; varying levels of measurement precision; and, the widespread effect of each measurement.  (2) difficulties arise due to the: time bound nature of the decision making process; and, the availability and interpretation of risk-related measurements.  To help address these issues, we propose a conceptual framework to support and minimize the level of analyst involvement during the management of operational risk specified in organizational models. This is achieved by propagating/analyzing risk-related evaluations across descriptions of distributed, inter-dependant and mission critical work activities.

G. Koliadis, A. Ghose. A Conceptual Framework for Business Process Redesign. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support (BPMDS’09), 2009.

This paper addresses the problem of managing business process change at the level of design-time artifacts, such as BPMN process models. Our approach relies on a sophisticated scheme for annotating BPMN models with functional effects as well as non-functional properties. This permits us to assess the extent of change being made, as well as the performance characteristics of the resulting processes.

E. Morrison, A. Menzies, G. Koliadis, A. Ghose. Business Process Integration: Method and Analysis. Proceedings of the Sixth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM’09), 2009.

Process integration aims to investigate relationships across a business compendium to produce classifications and merge activities into a standardized system.  This paper proposes a practical method for process integration and provides a theoretical framework for business process integration assessment.

G. Koliadis and A. K. Ghose. Service Compliance: Towards Electronic Compliance Programs. Technical Report (2008-TR-01) Decision Systems Lab, University of Wollongong, 2008.

“Compliance” is a multi-faceted concept that encompasses the capability of an organization to monitor and meet impinging obligations. It has recently become an area of significant concern to many major multi-national organizations. The proliferation of service-oriented systems rely on rich behavioral descriptions of functionality to facilitate seamless application composition and interoperation. These descriptions are sub ject to compliance with protocols (behavioral encoding) or business rules (state-based encoding). In addition, complete life-cycle support for dealing with compliance, which should cater for the specification, checking and change of policies and processes, is of crucial importance. In this article we explore the depth of generic compliance programs and provide an overview and agenda for “Service Compliance”, outlining some of the research challenges in this rapidly emerging area of research.

M. Bhuiyan, M.M.Z. Islam, G. Koliadis, A. Krishna, and A. Ghose. Supporting UML Activity Diagrams Using Organizational Models. In: Challenges in Information Technology Management, World Scientific, 2008, 182-188.

Agent–oriented conceptual modeling notations such as i* represent an interesting approach for modeling early phase requirements which includes organizational contexts, stakeholder intentions and rationale. On the other hand, Unified Modeling Language (UML) is suitable for later phases of requirement capture which usually focus on completeness, consistency, and automated verification of functional requirements for the new system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to facilitate and support the combined use of notation for modeling requirement engineering process in a synergistic fashion. For organizational modeling/early phase requirements capturing we use the i* modeling framework that describes the organizational relationships among various actors and their rationales. For late (functional) requirements specification, we rely on UML Activity Diagram.

G. Koliadis, A. Ghose, and S. Padmanabhuni. Towards an Enterprise Business Process Architecture Standard. Proceeeding of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC’08), 2008.

An effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the intentional knowledge required of such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the “practicality” of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current “state-of-the-art” in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed.

A. Ghose, G. Koliadis. Actor Ecosystems: Service-Oriented Configuration of Virtual Organizations. Proceeeding of the Third IEEE Workshop on Service and Process Oriented Software Engineering (SOPOSE’08), 2008.

Complex business networks such as supply chains, with cross-organizational workflows of even greater complexity, are becoming increasingly common. The problem of engineering cross-organizational processes in a manner that accounts for inter-organizational constraints, and dynamics, has received little attention in the literature. This paper describes an effective framework for addressing the problem. The actor eco-systems approach leverages the eco-systems metaphor to model cross-enterprise constraints, change propogation and equilibria. It describes how cross-enterprise processes can be derived from such models and maintained in the face of dynamic business contexts.

A. Ghose and G. Koliadis. PCTk: A ToolKit for Managing Business Process Compliance In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN’08).

Determining whether business processes comply with regulatory or legislative requirements, and understanding how best to modify processes when they are found to be non-compliant are being increasingly recognized as difficult, yet important problems. This paper proposes practical solutions to these problems by considering business processes described in the industry standard BPMN notation, and compliance requirements encoded as business rules. We define a simple technique for analyst-mediated semantic annotation of BPMN models with effects. Design-time compliance checking then reduces to simple traversal of these effect-annotated process models. More importantly, we are able to identify minimally different process models that restore compliance, or minimal sources of inconsistency, which, if appropriately modified, would lead to compliant processes.

A. K. Ghose, G. Koliadis. Model Eco-Systems: Multi-Perspective, Multi-Modal Model Management. Proceeeding of the Fifth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM’08), 2008.

Modeling is core software engineering practice. Conceptual models are constructed to establish an abstract understanding of the domain among stakeholders. These are then refined into computational models that aim to realize a conceptual specification. The refinement process yields sets of models that are initially incomplete and inconsistent by nature. The aim of the engineering process is to negotiate consistency and completeness toward a stable state sufficient for deployment / implementation. This paper presents the notion of a model ecosystem, which permits the capability to guide analyst edits toward stability by computing consistency and completeness equilibria for conceptual models during periods of model change.

G. Koliadis, A. Ghose. Supporting Organizational Design with a Configurable and Iterated Risk Assessment Scheme. Proceedings of the First Mahasarakham International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence (MIWAI’07), 2007.

We propose a conceptual framework to integrate multicriteria risk assessment with organizational modeling and design. Our framework aims to minimize the level of analyst involvement by propagating iterated risk-related evaluations. Once propagated, risk is localized to areas requiring improvement. We employ an abstract preference structure, which has been successfully used in the constraint literature for modeling and reasoning about user preference. This allows us to represent and combine configurable risk metrics. Our proposed risk analysis framework is developed and illustrated using a well known, high-level organizational modeling notation named i*.

Ghose, A. Koliadis, G. Auditing Business Process Compliance. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC2007).

Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations. We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of {\em compliance patterns}. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support.

A. K. Ghose, G. Koliadis and M. Bhuiyan. Managing process dynamics using organizational models. International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management.

Business Process Management (BPM) provides the methods, tools and modelling notations to support a process-centric organizational view and management capability. As organizations grow in size and complexity, process improvement initiatives may involve change that has direct / significant impact across an organization. Thus, we provide methods and extensions to existing process modelling notations to analyse change against high- level models of the organization. Our approach permits improved analysis against higher-level organizational structures, motivations, inter-dependencies and capabilities that should be ideally considered as primary requirements during process design. Additionally, the organizational model becomes the ‘scaffolding’ with which to construct effective process architectures and management portfolios. This paper discusses our approach in the context of two modelling notations – the i* framework as an organizational modelling notation, and the BPMN notation for business process modelling.

A. Ghose and G. Koliadis. Actor eco-systems: From high-level agent models to executable processes via semantic annotations. Invited paper (based on keynote address). In Proc. of the 2007 Engineering Semantic Agent Systems Workshop , IEEE Computer Society Press.

We introduce the notion of an Actor Eco-System, a framework that addresses the design-time requirements of building multi-actor (multi-agent) systems such as supply chains, business networks, virtual organizations etc. We describe how semantic annotation of abstract models of actor eco-systems can be used to derive executable process models that realize such systems. We outline a potentially powerful toolkit for model to code transformations in complex agent-oriented settings.

A. Ghose, G. Koliadis and A. Cheung. Rapid business process discovery. In Proc. of 26th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2007), 2007, Springer LNCS.

Modeling is an important and time consuming part of the Business Process Management life-cycle. An analyst reviews existing documentation and queries relevant domain experts to construct both mental and concrete models of the domain. To aid this exercise, we propose the Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD) framework and prototype tool that can query heterogeneous information resources (e.g. corporate documentation, web-content, code e.t.c.) and rapidly construct proto-models to be incrementally adjusted to correctness by an analyst. This constitutes a departure from building and constructing models toward just editing them. We believe this rapid mixed-initiative modeling will increase analyst productivity by significant orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. Furthermore, the possibility of using the approach in distributed and real-time settings seems appealing and may help in significantly improving the quality of the models being developed w.r.t. being consistent, complete, and concise.

G. Koliadis and A. Ghose. Semantic verification of inter-operational business process models. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Services Congress. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts.

A. Ghose and G. Koliadis. Business process compliance: Techniques for design-time auditing and resolution. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2007).

Compliance standards impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations. We present an approach to enhance business process modeling and associated notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We apply a minimal revision strategy that incorporates both the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. This allows us to partially automate the search for minimal compliance alterations. Thus, analyst involvement is significantly reduced and improved support is afforded during this important decision making task. We illustrate our approach using an accepted business process modeling standard, BPMN.

M. Bhuiyan, Z. Islam, G. Koliadis, A. Krishna, A. Ghose. Integration of Agent-Oriented Conceptual Models and UML Activity Diagrams Using Effect Annotations. In Proceedings of the 31st IEEE Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2007), Beijing, China, IEEE Computer Society Press.

Agent oriented conceptual modeling notations such as i* represents an interesting approach for modeling early
phase requirements which includes organizational contexts, stakeholder intentions and rationale. On the other hand, Unified Modeling Language (UML) is suitable for later phases of requirement capture which usually focus on completeness, consistency, and automated verification of functional requirements for the new system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to facilitate and support the combined use of notation for modeling requirement engineering process in a synergistic fashion. For organizational modeling/early phase requirements capturing we use the i* modeling framework that describes the organizational relationships among various actors and their rationales. For late (functional) requirements specification, we rely on UML Activity Diagram.

A. Ghose, G. Koliadis and A. Cheung. Process discovery from model and text artefacts. In 2007 IEEE Services Congress Workshop Proceedings. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Modeling is an important and time consuming part of the Business Process Management life-cycle. An analyst reviews existing documentation and queries relevant domain experts to construct both mental and concrete models of the domain. To aid this exercise, we propose the Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD) framework and prototype tool that can query heterogeneous information resources (e.g. corporate documentation, web-content, code e.t.c.) and rapidly construct proto-models to be incrementally adjusted to correctness by an analyst. This constitutes a departure from building and constructing models toward just editing them. We believe this rapid mixed-initiative modeling will increase analyst productivity by significant orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. Furthermore, the possibility of using the approach in distributed and real-time settings seems appealing and may help in significantly improving the quality of the models being developed w.r.t. being consistent, complete, and concise.

M. Bhuiyan, Z. Islam, G. Koliadis, A. Krishna, A. Ghose. Managing Business Process Risk Using Rich Organizational Models. In Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Requirements Engineering For Services, IEEE Computer Society Press.

Business processes represent the operational capabilities of an organization. In order to ensure process continuity, the effective management of risk becomes an area of key concern. In this paper we propose an approach for supporting risk identification with the use of higher-level organizational models. We provide some intuitive metrics for extracting measures of actor criticality, and vulnerability from organizational models. This helps direct risk management to areas of critical importance within organization models. Additionally, the information can be used to assess alternative organizational structures in domains where risk mitigation is crucial. At the process level, these measures can be used to help direct improvements to the robustness and failsafe capabilities of critical or vulnerable processes. We believe our novel approach, will provide added benefits when used with other approaches to risk management during business process management, that do not reference the greater organizational context during risk assessment.

G. Koliadis, Moshiur Bhuiyan and A. K. Ghose. Correlating Business Process Models and Organizational Models to Manage Change. Proc. of the 2006 Australian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS-2006).

Business Process Management (BPM) provides the methods, tools and modelling notations to support a process-centric organizational view and management capability. As organizations grow in size and complexity, process improvement initiatives may involve change that has direct / significant impact across an organization. Thus, we provide methods and extensions to existing process modelling notations to analyse change against high- level models of the organization. Our approach permits improved analysis against higher-level organizational structures, motivations, inter-dependencies and capabilities that should be ideally considered as primary requirements during process design. Additionally, the organizational model becomes the ‘scaffolding’ with which to construct effective process architectures and management portfolios. This paper discusses our approach in the context of two modelling notations – the i* framework as an organizational modelling notation, and the BPMN notation for business process modelling.