Designing Business Process Management Solutions using Open Standards and Patterns

In this course, we understand why Business Process Management (BPM) is a Number 1 priority for any CEO and CIO today. Starting from recent trends in Business and IT, we look at the BPM life cycle and technology stack, familiarize ourselves with its state of the art and discuss open research problems.

The course consists of 4 parts and is accompanied by practical exercises in business process modeling, simulation, and the application of process patterns.

Part 1 introduces BPM, the BPM life cycle, technology stack and basics of the BPM methodology.

In Part 2, students learn the version 2 of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard, accepted by the OMG this summer.

In Part 3, we discuss the most common patterns and anti-patterns in business process modeling and learn how they can be used to improve the quality of a business process management solution.

Part 4 extends our considerations beyond process modeling and discusses holistic approaches incorporating data, resources, agents and adding a systemic and anthropological point of view.

Jana Koehler holds a Ph.D. from Saarland University Saarbrücken, Germany, and leads the Business Integration Technologies group at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. She joined IBM in Spring 2001 after having worked as a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), as an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, and as a project manager at Schindler Elevators R&D.
Her current work focuses on software engineering and compiler-based methods for process-oriented distributed systems. Major milestones of her previous work are novel algorithmic techniques that enabled AI planning systems to scale to complex realistic problems and a software architecture and algorithms that permitted the commercial breakthrough of destination control systems in the elevator industry. She has published well-cited papers in artificial intelligence and business process management, won several scientific and best-paper awards and was nominated for full professorships in Computer Science. Jana Koehler is a life-time member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a member of the German Society for Informatics (GI), and president of the DFKI alumni network. She is a regular reviewer of major conferences and journals in her fields of expertise and occasionally works as a reviewer for national science funding organizations. In 2009, she is the Industry Chair of the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management.