Research Students

Karsten Ploesser

Principal Supervisor: Professor Michael Rosemann

Associate Supervisors: Dr. Jan Recker

Expected Completion: March 2011

Title: Context-aware Business Process Design

Abstract: How do business processes of an organisation react to external events such as natural disasters, interest rate changes, crude price hikes, or macroeconomic effects? In a recent example, a German bank lost € 300 Million in a scheduled swap transaction to Lehman Brothers hours after the American investment bank had announced bankruptcy. The imminent threat caused by the 2008 financial crisis was apparently not on its radar screen. In systems thinking, the ideal state in which a system can respond to any disturbance to which it is exposed is described as requisite variety. Now, how can organisations leverage this principle in highly dynamic environments?

Conventionally, companies have modelled business processes in isolation from environmental factors. Such process models are optimised against a baseline of variables. While this may seem justified from a high level viewpoint, it seldom covers the variability required during process operations and certainly does not suffice to achieve requisite variety. Current research suggests that the study of the extrinsic properties of change may yield the answer to improved business process design.

Context-awareness in business process design studies the contextual variables that impact business process operations. This covers a wide spectrum of variables such as weather patterns, commodity prices, competitive environment, trends in the financial markets, regulatory environment, and trade policies. The study aims to develop a general model for context-awareness as well as artefacts that facilitate context-aware design of business processes. Areas of investigation are context planning and modelling, context learning, usage of industry-specific context taxonomies for best practice process modelling and benchmarking.

Karsten holds a degree in Media System Design from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and has extensive industry experience as a software engineer developing BPM products in SAP’s NetWeaver division. He is a member of the authoring team of several industry standards in the BP modelling space including BPMN 2.0, WS-BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask. Next to his doctoral studies, he currently holds the position of senior researcher in the SAP Research centre in Brisbane.