Second IEEE Workshop on Agile Cooperative Process-Aware Information
Systems (ProGility 2007) - Workshop Report
Barbara Weber
University of Innsbruck
6020 Innsbruck
Austria
Manfred Reichert
University of Twente
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands
Rik Eshuis
TU Eindhoven
5600 MB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Abstract
The goal of the ProGility workshop is to bring together
practitioners and researchers from different communities
who share an interest in agile cooperative process-aware
information systems. The vision is to be able to rapidly im-
plement new processes and to quickly adapt existing process
implementations to environmental changes. This workshop
report gives an overview of the presented papers that ad-
dress various flexibility issues of process-aware information
systems.
1 Introduction
The economic success of an enterprise more and more
depends on its ability to react to changes in its environ-
ment in a quick and flexible way. Business trends such
as increasing product and service variability, quicker time-
to-market, and increasing division of labor along a global
supply chain of goods and services force enterprises to col-
laborate with each other in networks that are dynamic, flex-
ible, ad-hoc, and adaptive. Thus enterprises are develop-
ing a growing interest in new concepts, systems, and solu-
tions which help them to flexibly align their organizational
structures, business processes, and supporting information
systems to these new requirements and to optimize inter-
actions with customers and business partners. While there
has been major progress in disciplines that are interested
in structured and unstructured intra-organizationalbusiness
processes, the agileenterprise is still a vision. Agility in this
context refers to the ability of an enterprise to rapidly set
up new business processes and projects in order to quickly
adapt to changes in the environment. To support these
changes, traditional enterprises have to align their existing
information systems while virtual enterprises need to cus-
tomize and integrate the individual partner processes. To
meet its business objectives, the agile enterprise continu-
ously re-aligns its business processes as well as the inter-
actions with its partners and customers to meet the current
requirements.
The ProGility workshop is a merger of two previous
WETICE workshops on process flexibility (ProFlex) and
process integration(PINCET).Buildinguponthe success of
these workshops, the goal of the ProGility workshop is to
bring together practitioners and researchers from different
communities such as BPM, software engineering, service-
oriented computing, artificial intelligence, and Computer
Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) who share an in-
terest in flexibility of cooperative process-aware informa-
tion systems and team support in both an intra- and inter-
organizational setting. The workshop aims at discussing
the current state of ongoing research and at sharing prac-
tical experiences. Submitted papers have been evaluated on
the basis of significance, originality and technical quality.
2 Overview of the Papers
The paper by Bobrik and Bauer presents ongoing work
done in the Proviado project on the visualization of large
business processes. The presented approach provides for
flexible and highly configurable business process visual-
izations, which can be personalized and adapted to users’
needs. In detail, Proviado distinguishes three dimensions
for processvisualization: First, it allowsto reducecomplex-
itybydiscardingoraggregatingprocessinformationnotrel-
evant in the given context. Second, the notation and graph-
ical appearance of process elements (e.g., activities, data
objects, control connectors) is customizable. Third, dif-
ferent presentation forms (e.g., process graph, swim lane,
calendar, table) are supported. Regarding the first dimen-
sion, Proviado provides a powerful and customizable view
mechanism. The supported view concept allows to flexibly
adapt the presented process information through customiz-
able graph aggregation and graph reduction techniques.
The paper by Minor, Schmalen, Koldehoff and
Bergmann addresses run-time process flexibility. In the
proposed approach flexibility is achieved through structural
adaptations of process instances, late planning, and break-
point mechanisms. Structural adaptations of running pro-
cess instances (e.g., to add or delete process steps) are sup-
ported by an authoring component. This component also
enables the case-based retrieval of similar past workflows.
Similarity calculation is based on the structure and the sta-
tus of the ongoingprocess instance as well as on its context.
The late modelingfeatureallows to deal with uncertaintyby
leavingpartsofthemodelunspecifiedduringbuild-timeand
by deferring the decision how the respective parts should
look like to the run-time. Finally, the suggested breakpoint
mechanism ensures that parts of a process can be further
executed while other parts have to be blocked in order to
decide about a change.
Mueller,Reichert, HerbstandPoppapresentatoolwhich
addresses one of the biggest challenges for cooperative
processes in the engineering domain, namely the model-
ing, coordination and maintenance of the many interde-
pendencies existing between the different sub-processes in
engineering. For dealing with this challenge, the CORE-
PRO project follows a model-driven approach. It allows
to semi-automatically derive process structures from large
data structures. Basic to this is the observation that in the
engineering domain respective process structures are char-
acterized by a strong relationship with the assembly of the
product; i.e., the sub-processes to be coordinated can be
related to the different product components. COREPRO
utilizes this information about the product and its structure
for deriving, coordinatingand maintaining such data-driven
process structures. This will be of particular benefit if hun-
dreds up to thousands of sub-processes have to be coordi-
nated (as it is the case, for example, in the automotive do-
main).
Mehandjiev, Stalker and Carpenter present an approach
which aims at more flexible supply chains. In particular,
companies and large organizations should be enabled to
build Instant Virtual Enterprises in order to react to emerg-
ing market opportunities. For this, the authors suggest an
approach,which is based on coordinationtheory and virtual
organizations. By systematically delaying the recruitment
of partners more flexible supply chains can be built.
Vonk, Wang and Grefen aim at more agility by facilitat-
ing the exchange of services or partners. The authors ar-
gue that bridging the gap between business-level SLAs and
IT-level SLAs is fundamental. The paper focuses on trans-
actional QoS and suggests a mapping between process and
services.
Finally, the paper of Ziemann, Werth, Matheis and Kahl
present ongoing work towards tool support for integrated
modeling of private and public business processes. The pa-
per presents a view concept for modeling private and public
processes. The tool aims at supporting the transformation
of public to private processes as well as the transformation
ofbusinesslevelrepresentationstoexecutableprocessspec-
ifications (i.e., technical level).
3 Conclusion and Future Research Topics
The different papers illustrate various flexibility needs
of process-aware information systems (PAIS) from differ-
ent domains, and they make evident that any PAIS will not
be accepted by its users if rigidity or inflexibility comes
with it. Flexibility issues do not only arise at the level
of intra-organizational business processes, but increasingly
emerge at the level of business collaborations (i.e., inter-
organizational business processes) as well. Many different
aspects have to be considered when realizing flexible pro-
cess support including the correctness of (dynamic) process
changes, ease of change, cost of change, and security.
Often, tool vendors promise flexible technologies and
paradigmsforrealizing process-awareinformationsystems,
but are often unable to cope with fundamental issues re-
lated to process flexibility and process change (e.g., cor-
rectness and robustness). The existence of different process
support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing
existing change approaches makes it even more challeng-
ing for PAIS engineers to choose the adequate technology.
This necessitates a framework which fosters the systematic
comparison of existing process management technologies
with respect to their flexibility and change support. The
recent emergence of change as well as exception handling
patterns constitute an important step towards such a com-
parison framework. Furthermore, more experimental and
empirical research is needed in future.
Thoughconsiderableprogresshasbeenachievedwithre-
spect to the realization of flexible PAIS, a lot of challenges
remain. While there exist many approaches and paradigms
for the flexible support of intra-organizational processes,
only little flexibility support has been provided for inter-
organizational processes so far. One major challenge ex-
isting in this context concerns the evolution of process
choreographies, i.e., the change of interactions and mes-
sage exchanges between the partner processes in a cross-
organizational setting. If respective modifications are con-
ducted in an uncontrolled manner, severe inconsistencies or
errors might occur in the sequel. In particular, modifica-
tions of private processes performed by a single party may
indirectly affect the implementation of the private processes
of partners as well. What is needed is a powerful change
frameworkforchoreographiesthat allowsprocessengineers
to reason about changes of private processes and their ef-
fects on public processes as well as on partner processes.
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