Business Process Management

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect for experts to handle, by contrast computer scientists often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Mathias Weske argues that the communities involved need to share a common understanding of the principles underlying business process management. To this end, he develops an overall picture that describes core BPM concepts and technologies and explains their relationships. This picture covers high-level business aspects like business goals, strategies, and value chains, but it concentrates on process modeling techniques and process enactment platforms, taking into account the different stakeholders involved.

After starting with a presentation of general foundations, process orchestrations and process choreographies are covered. Based on control flow patterns, concrete process languages are introduced in a concise manner, including Workflow nets, Event-driven Process Chains, Yet Another Workflow Language, and the Business Process Modeling Notation. The various stages during the design and implementation of process choreographies are discussed. Different soundness properties are investigated in a chapter on formal aspects of business processes. Finally, he investigates concrete architectures to enact business processes, including workflow management architectures, case handling architectures and service-oriented architectures. He also shows how standards like SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture.

This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. It is also valuable for project managers and IT professionals working in business process management, since it provides a vendor-independent view on the topic. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information, such as links to references that are available online, exercises that offer the reader a deeper involvement with the topics addressed, and additional teaching material.

• Administration
• SOAP
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Service-Oriented Architecture
• Workflow
• Workflow Management
• business process
• business process management
• computer science
• information system
• modeling
• organization
• process management

"This book presents comprehensive and updated material for anyone interested in getting to know the vast field of BPM. With its excellent organization and use of many figures, it can also be an excellent choice as a text book on BPM." - Amit Sheth, LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA

"An extremely well rounded and comprehensive discussion of the subject of business process management" - Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, San Jose, CA, USA

"A superb textbook for students in both computer science and business administration. Moreover, it is also very useful for practitioners since it provides a comprehensive coverage of BPM independently of industry hypes around workflow management, business process management, and service-oriented architectures." - from the Foreword by Wil van der Aalst, Eindhoven University of Technology,
The Netherlands

"Business process management (BPM) is a topic more pressing than ever even 15 years after its inception. Mathias Weske takes an up-to-date, fresh, and comprehensive look at the subject and connects a number of areas to which BPM applies, from a conceptual as well as a technical and an application-oriented point of view. A definitive must-read for anybody studying or working in this area." -
Gottfried Vossen, European Research Center for Information Systems, University of Muenster

• Hasso Plattner Institut an der Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

  Mathias Weske

Mathias Weske is Professor of Software Systems Technology at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam, Germany, where he leads the business process technology research group.

His current research interests include various topics in workflow management, web services technology, and enterprise application integration. He is a member of the GI, vice chair of the executive committee of GI SIG EMISA, and a member of IEEE and ACM.

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