Business Process Management (BPM) - Students

[Print-friendly version]

Nick Russell Email: n.russell@qut.edu.au

Principal Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede

Associate Supervisor: Dr. David Edmond & Prof. Wil van der Aalst

Expected Completion: April 2007

Title: Foundation of Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract: Recent surveys suggest that Business Process Management (BPM) is now an area of primary concern for most medium and large companies and is seen as a key means of improving efficiency and reducing cost, the mantra of the modern business environment. However the increased focus that BPM has received from companies and the media is at odds with the relative maturity of tools and techniques that are actually available in the area. Despite the attention that it is receiving, there is a lack of commonly agreed fundamental concepts that are applicable to the domain and whilst there has been explosive growth in the variety of enactment tools that are available, there is a palpable lack of broadly adopted modelling and enactment standards for business processes. Moreover those notations that show signs of achieving widespread adoption ( e.g. BPMN, BPEL, UML) are not based on a rigorous formal foundation but rather adopt a "committee-based" approach to standards development opportunistically absorbing concepts from a wide variety of domains without any consideration of the manner in which they might be integrated with existing language constructs or how they might actually be enacted in practical terms.