Informatica

The aim of the article is to identify drivers and limiters of the development of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) from the point of view of the industry and the academia, and to formulate practical recommendations. Their identification is crucial in order to remove a considerable gap between the approach to knowledge-intensive business processes (kiBPs), which require dynamic management and are decisive with regard to the competitive position of the organization under the conditions of Industry 5.0, as well as the possibilities offered by ICT solution, and the current possibilities and needs of BPM practitioners. The authors applied a methodological approach based on a theoretical literature review and a review of practice through online structured expert interviews with key BPMS solution providers. According to the literature, the main drivers pertain to the enterprises’ efforts to reduce costs and improve their productivity and efficiency, develop technology, and enact changes in business models and business processes. According to vendors, the main drivers for the combination of BPMS and Case Management Systems (CMS) were the users’ expectations, technology identity, and further development perspectives. The main limiters of the decision to combine both classes of systems were technological problems predicted by vendors related to the unification of historically different technologies used in both classes of systems, as well as implementation-based problems related to the likely need to reconfigure the software environments of software users. The article formulated original recommendations for both vendors and users of iBPMS software, including the basic recommendation of the selection of the methodology of implementation of BPM and iBPMS in accordance with the context of the organization’s operations (the nature of its business processes).

One of the results of the evolution of business process management (BPM) is the development of information technology (IT), methodologies and software tools to manage all types of processes – from traditional, structured processes to unstructured processes, for which it is not possible to define a detailed flow as a sequence of tasks to be performed before implementation. The purpose of the article is to present the evolution of intelligent BPM systems (iBPMS) and dynamic case management/adaptive case management systems (DCMS/ACMS) and show that they converge into one class of systems, additionally absorbing new emerging technologies such as process mining, robotic process automation (RPA), or machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI). The content of research reports on iBPMS and DCMS systems by Gartner and Forrester consulting companies from the last 10 years was analysed. The nature of this study is descriptive and based solely on information from secondary data sources. It is an argumentative paper, and the study serves as the arguments that relate to the main research questions. The research results reveal that under business pressure, the evolution of both classes of systems (iBPMS and DCMS/ACMS) tends to cover the functionality of the same area of requirements by enabling the support of processes of different nature. This de facto means the creation of one class of systems, although for marketing reasons, some vendors will still offer separate products for some time to come. The article shows that the main driver of unified software system development is not the new possibilities offered by IT, but the requirements imposed on BPM by the increasingly stronger impact of knowledge management (KM) with regard to the way business processes are executed. Hence the anticipation of the further evolution of methodologies and BPM supporting systems towards integration with KM and elements of knowledge management systems (KMS). This article presents an original view on the features and development trends of software systems supporting BPM as a consequence of knowledge economy (KE) requirements in accordance with the concept of dynamic BPM.

The symbiosis between an enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture results in so-called service-oriented enterprise architecture and brings up new problems for service-oriented enterprise systems engineering. One of the most important is a business service quality definition, specification and evaluation. The paper proposes a formal model of enterprise business service quality evaluation framework to encompass and balance all the viewpoints and perspectives on an enterprise business service quality.

The paper proposes a novel predictive-reactive planning and scheduling framework in which both approaches are combined to complement each other in a reasonably balanced way. Neither original scheduling algorithms nor original techniques can be find in this paper. It also does not intend to invent new mechanisms or to propose some cardinally new ideas. The aim is to choose, adapt and test ideas, mechanisms and algorithms already proposed by other researchers. The focus of this research is set on make-to-order production environments. The proposed approach aims not only to absorb disruptions in shop floor level schedules but also to mitigate the impacts of potential exceptions, which disrupt mid-term level production plans. It is based on application of risk mitigation techniques and combines various simulation techniques extended by optimization procedures. The proposed approach is indented to be implemented in Advanced Planning and Scheduling system, which is an add-on for Enterprise Resources Planning system. To make it easier to understand the focus of the paper, at the beginning the position from which we start is clarified.

Regarding the complexity of actual software systems, including web portals, it is becoming more and more difficult to develop software systems such that their real usage will satisfy their intended usage. To tackle this problem, we can compare the a priori assumptions about how the system should be used with the actual user behavior in order to decide how the system could be improved. For this aim, we propose to employ the same formalism to express the intended usage, the web portal model and the real usage extracted from system usage traces by data mining algorithms. Inspired from BioCham, we propose to use temporal logic and Kripke structure as such a common formalism.

The main purpose of the paper is to compare ontology‐based reuse techniques in domain engineering and enterprise engineering. It discusses attempts to combine classical domain engineering techniques with ontology‐based techniques as well as the attempts to incorporate ontologies in enterprise engineering process and demonstrates that, on the one hand, both approaches still are not mature enough to solve practical reuse problems and, on the other hand, both propose ideas that can be used to develop more mature approach. The main contribution of the paper is the detail description of the problems of ontology‐based reuse of enterprise engineering assets.

The development of software systems is intensive person-oriented process. Therefore it is essential to use previous experience and knowledge. The extension of reuse through analogy is analysed in this paper. The proposed grouping of analogical methods, rules, etc., relies on their adaptability to application software development. The emphasis here is on analogue as a criterion to safeguard the desirable properties of application software. Knowledge kinds and mechanisms to enable reuse through analogy are discussed.