1 Special Focus Issue

Business Process Management (BPM) efforts resulted in a plethora of approaches, methods, and tools to support the design, analysis, improvement, enactment, and management of operational business processes. The BPM discipline combines knowledge from information technology and management sciences and applies this to operational business processes. The ultimate goal of BPM is to embed the “process thinking” mindset within organizations, i.e., to conceive the organization as a set of interrelated, end-to-end business processes, which need to be managed holistically, and continuously improved, in order to ameliorate organizational performance.

Interestingly, the scope of BPM extends far beyond that of traditional methods such as workflow automation and six sigma, which seek to identify process-related problems and address them incrementally. BPM is also about transformational process change, aiming to achieve breakthrough innovation within organizations. The importance of process modeling, model-based analysis (e.g., simulation and verification), improvement, analytics (e.g., data and process mining, process discovery, conformance checking, and predictive analytics), as well as lateral thinking methods (e.g., design thinking) for BPM is evident.

As the BPM discipline is maturing, there is a need to provide more structure and show “how, where, and when” BPM can be used. As a reference, an initial set of 20 BPM use cases was presented (van der Aalst 2013). These use cases aimed to structure the domain and were used to analyze trends in papers presented at the BPM conference series. Although the 20 BPM use cases triggered insightful discussions, they are just a starting point for systematically identifying, clarifying, and organizing BPM requirements. Moreover, many alternative approaches to rigorously structure the BPM discipline can be envisioned.

This special focus issue aims to attract original contributions that can be seen as complementary or that provide alternative or more specific sets of BPM use cases. Authors should not feel restricted by the initial set of 20 BPM use cases. Rather, it is important that the contributions are innovative and rigorous. For example, we welcome empirical studies analyzing BPM approaches, literature or tools in a systematic way.

We seek contributions to the following areas:

  • BPM use cases (alternative collections, empirical evaluations of use cases)

  • Use cases for specific BPM areas (enactment, mining, improvement, etc.)

  • BPM ontologies

  • Multi-perspective BPM meta models

  • Alternative BPM lifecycle models

In fact, this special issue is open to any approach, method or tool showing “how, where, and when” BPM can be used. However, any contribution should provide a new angle on process management related to the BPM use cases and may be related to topics such as:

  • BPM modeling languages (declarative and procedural)

  • BPM enactment infrastructures (cloud, service-oriented, etc.)

  • Process model analysis and improvement (simulation, verification, etc.)

  • Data-driven analysis (process mining, compliance, business process intelligence, etc.)

  • Process flexibility and case management

  • Process reuse and repositories

  • BPM in the large

  • Social and managerial aspects of BPM

Submissions should be innovative. Survey papers providing an overview of BPM using established notions such as the basic BPM life-cycle model are not within the scope. Originality and rigor are key!

2 Submission Guidelines

Please submit papers for the sections BISE BPM Use Cases via the journal’s online submission system (http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/). Please observe the instructions regarding the format and size of contributions to Business & Information Systems Engineering BISE. Submissions are accepted in English only. Papers should not exceed 50,000 characters including spaces, minus 5000 characters per page for illustrations. Detailed authors’ guidelines can be downloaded from http://www.bise-journal.org/.

All papers will be reviewed anonymously (double-blind process) by several referees with regard to relevance, originality, and research quality. In addition to the editors of the journal, including those of this special focus, distinguished international professionals with scientific and practical backgrounds will be involved in the review process.

3 Schedule

  • Paper submission deadline:

    2015-03-01

  • Author notification: 2015-04-26

  • Completion of the first revision:

    2015-06-28

  • Completion of a second revision:

    2015-09-20

  • Planned publication: February 2016