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 in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Matthias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. To this end, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. After starting with a presentation of general foundations and abstraction models, he explains concepts like process orchestrations and choreographies, as well as process properties and data dependencies. Finally, he presents both traditional and advanced business process management architectures, covering, for example, workflow management systems, service-oriented architectures, and data-driven approaches. In addition, he shows how standards like WfMC, 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. This 2^nd edition contains major updates on BPMN Version 2 process orchestration and process choreographies, and the chapter on BPM methodologies has been completely rewritten. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information and additional teaching material.

From the reviews of the second edition:

“The subject Business process management is of interest to professional in business administration and computer science. … The author opines that both the communities need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. In this context, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. … This is an ideal text book for the students for CSE & business administration.” (CSI eNewsletter, Vol. 3 (10), November, 2012)

"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)

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.