Monday's Keynote

Data-centric Approaches to Business Process Management – Fundamental Concepts, Tool Support, Open Challenges

Prof. Manfred Reichert, Ulm University, Germany

Abstract

The increasing importance of data in the automation of business processes has led to the emergence of data-centric process support paradigms, e.g., artifact-centric, object-aware, and data-driven approaches. By focusing on data instead of activities, respective approaches differ significantly from the widely used activity-centric paradigm, aiming at the support of data-intensive processes as well as an increased process flexibility. In particular, the progress of a data-centric process depends on the availability of data rather than on the completion of activities. Moreover, the focus has shifted away from large, monolithic processes towards the use of rather small processes (e.g., object lifecyces), which need to interact and collaborate in order to reach a common business goal. The objective of this keynote presentation is to provide profound insights into the fundamental concepts and features of data-centric approaches as well as their maturity. Moreover, it will discuss some of the open challenges that need to be tackled when applying data-centric approaches in the large scale and along the entire process lifecycle.

Biography

Manfred is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Databases and Information Systems Institute at Ulm University, Germany. Prior to this appointment, he was Associate Professor at the University of Twente. His research interests span across the fields of digital services, information systems, business process management, and process flexibility. Amongst others, his ongoing work focuses on large-scale object-aware process management. Currently, he collaborates with several large companies, including Daimler, BMW and Uhlmann Pac Systems. Manfred was PC co-chair of the BPM’08, CoopIS’11, and EDOC’13 conferences, and general chair of the BPM’09 and EDOC’14 conferences as well as the BPM’15 workshops. He is corecipient of several best paper wards (e.g. OTM’05, EDOC’08, AIMS‘17) and received the BPM Test of Time Award at the BPM’13 conference. Finally, he is co-founder of the AristaFlow Ltd. and co-author of a Springer book on process flexibility.