Business Process Management

The main aim of this NWG is to create a unified strategy for applying BPM in order to solve real, cross‑domain challenges. This strategy will be driven by Common European Research Agenda and will follow the ideas and challenges elaborated in “Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures” of FP7. In order to achieve this NWG will focus on practical aspects of successful applying BPM to define appropriate business ecosystems (usually domain specific). In order to achieve it this work group will support research and technology for the following:

· Support roundtrip management of business processes.
Linking business level to IT level and vice versa. Provides methodologies, mechanisms and tools to simplify the way of linking individual phases of the whole business process lifecycle starting from business level (i.e. strategic design, process modelling, definition), going into IT level (i.e. implementation, simulation, testing, enactment, monitoring) and coming back to business level (process analysis, re‑design, improvement). In particular, it includes adaptive process enactment with advanced exception handling mechanisms, QoS‑aware and SLA based monitoring, process and information analytics for process improvement, service lead business process re‑design. Enforce non‑functional requirements defined on a business level on the IT level. If possible, provide automatic transformations / links between individual phases of business process lifecycle.

· Support the knowledge worker in business processes
Support the spectrum from automatable to manual processes. Involvement of knowledge workers in business processes. Provide various mechanisms and tools to support knowledge workers with the knowledge about processes: what was done (history), what is currently executed (present), what may be done in the next steps (future). Equip knowledge workers with mechanisms to optimise their way of working (e.g. workload balancing) as well as mechanisms to support ad-hoc decisions and other required dynamic changes.

· Provide solutions to emerging Business Ecosystems and cross-organisational Business processes
Define high-level coordination models (choreographies). Provide transformations to enable linking to intra-organisational process models and their execution. Validate/define new Business Models for service / process provisioning, adaptation and reselling. Collaborative business process management.

· Domain specific and cross-domain approaches for BPM
Standard support. Guidelines. Frameworks for analysis, introduction, management, validation of BPM solutions. Service oriented business process enablement of legacy systems. (Distributed) transaction support (models and approaches).

The work of this NWG should leverage the current standards and knowledge from Object Management Group (OMG) and Business Modelling and Integration (BMI), Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), Web Services (esp. OASIS and GGF), data exchange formats and standard communication protocols. This working group should steer the process of possible changes and extensions to the existing standards that come as the results of NESSI projects. On the basis of such results this working group should propose, if required, extensions to the existing standards. These extensions should be compliant with the overall NESSI vision and be suitable for all NESSI projects (not just for a particular one).