Zaakgericht werken is een principe dat een belangrijke rol speelt bij lokale overheden, maar zeker ook breder toepasbaar is. Het heeft veel overeenkomsten met service-oriëntatie. Het basisidee is dat je de diensten die je aanbiedt goed definieert en dat je de bijbehorende service levels bewaakt. Er zijn allerlei architectuurbouwblokken die een rol spelen bij zaakgericht werken zoals zaaksystemen, zaakmagazijnen en Persoonlijke Internet Pagina's. De vraag is echter wanneer de verschillende bouwblokken relevant zijn en hoe ze met elkaar samenhangen. Is bijvoorbeeld een zaakmagazijn noodzakelijk voor het publiceren van de status van vergunningen op Internet? In dit item zet ik alle belangrijke architectuurbouwblokken op een rij en laat hun samenhang zien.

Bedrijfsprocessen in kaart brengen blijft een vak apart. Er zijn inmiddels schitterende modelleertools waarmee procesmodellen met één druk op de knop kunnen worden omgezet in werkende applicaties die die processen kunnen ondersteunen of op basis van bedrijfsregels zelfs volledig kunnen uitvoeren, maar in het woud van mogelijke tools en methodieken is het vaak moeilijk kiezen. Bovendien zijn beschikbare proces referentiemodellen die er voor verschillende branches en toepassingsgebieden zijn vaak lastig vertaalbaar naar de eigen praktijk.

Net gelezen in een reclame mail van DataMonitor: "Increasingly globalized and regulated markets are demanding unprecedented level of business process agility, control and transparency. As enterprise application platforms have failed to cater for the needs of highly-differentiated business processes, BPM is emerging as a possible solution.". Ik geloof dat niet. Waarom niet? Nou, eigenlijk vanwege een simpele redenering.

Evaluation of modelling languages is important both to be able to select the most suitable languages according to the needs, and to improve existing languages. In this paper Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is presented and analytically evaluated according to the Semiotic Quality Framework. BPMN is a functionally oriented language well suited for modeling within the domain of business processes, but probably also general processes not only within the business domain. The evaluation indicates that BPMN is easily learned for simple use, and Business Process Diagrams (BPDs) are relatively easy to understand. Tools may fairly easily map BPDs into the BPEL4WS format, but executable systems then require creation of Web Services representing the Activities in BPDs. ...

We describe in this paper an insurance company that has recently wanted to standardize on business process modeling language. To perform the evaluation, a generic framework for assessing the quality of models and modeling languages was specialized to the needs of the company. Three different modeling languages were evaluated according to the specialized criteria.
The work illustrates the practical utility of the overall framework, where language quality features are looked upon as means to enable the creation of models of high quality. It also illustrates the need for specializing this kind of general framework based on the requirements of the specific organization.

Business Process Models are typically used to express inter or intra –enterprise business activities/processes. Contractual obligations need to be fulfilled through execution of business processes on behalf of the contracting parties . To do so, business contract terms and conditions need to be semantically integrated to existing internal business process models. Contract obligation, performance, non-performance and other related concepts have been expressed as conceptual models in a Multi-Tier Contract Ontology (MTCO). Based on the MTCO, business process modelers may model the contract obligation fulfillment process as Contract Workflow Models(CWM) using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) diagrams. ...

Business Process Management (BPM) systems provide a broad range of facilities to enact and manage operational business processes. Ideally, these systems should provide support for the complete BPM life-cycle: (re)design, configuration, execution, control, and diagnosis of processes. In the research presented, we evaluate the support provided by the FileNet P8 BPM Suite, which is consistently ranked as one of the leading commercial BPM systems. Taking realistic business scenarios as starting point, we completed a full pass through the BPM cycle with several tools from the FileNet P8 BPM Suite. We checked whether the expected support was provided by these tools and we also tested their interoperability. ...

Business practice shows that, often, different process models are employed in the various phases of the Business Process Management life cycle, each providing a different paradigm for capturing and representing the business process domain. Recently, significant efforts have been made to overcome the disintegration of process models by providing complementary language standards for process design (BPMN) and execution (BPEL), based on the claim that these languages are semantically integrated. However, the conceptual mapping between both languages remains unclear, thus it is undecided whether any BPMN diagram can be transformed to BPEL. In this paper we argue that there is conceptual mismatch between BPMN and BPEL that needs to be identified in order to guide the language integration process semantically. In our analysis we take into account the various perspectives of the Business Process Management life cycle, in particular business and technical analyst perspectives. Our approach is generic and can also be utilized as a guiding framework for identifying conceptual mismatch between other business process modeling languages.

Slowly but surely Business Process Management Systems1 gain in popularity and maturity. “The market for Business Process Automation software is small but growing rapidly. According to IDC, revenues are expected to approach $2 billion by 2006, compared with $295 million in 2001” 2. More and more organizations start projects orproof of concepts for implementing a BPMS tool for one or few of its processes. In itself a noble ambition: for people who believe that the Business Process is thé most important vehicle for running, improving and changing a business, BPMS is the way to go. This article therefore argues more the point of when and how to apply BPMS in the organization than the application of these tools itself.