SIS Seminars

"Policy-driven Business Process Modeling and Management"

Speaker:

J. Leon ZHAO
Visiting Professor,
Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology
Professor and Honeywell Fellow, University of Arizona

Date:

9 March 2006 (Thursday)

Time:

4:15 pm to 6:15 pm

Venue:

Meeting Room 4.4, Level 4
School of Information Systems

Abstract

For organizations with large-scale or a large number of business processes, maintaining process design efficiency and consistency under various changes is a non-trivial problem. Currently, the existing workflow technology does not offer analytical capabilities to handle workflow changes in an efficient and intelligent manner. In this presentation, we propose a policy-driven business process design methodology focusing on workflow change management. The main contributions of our study include:

(1) offering a novel policy perspective to business process design, which provides a formal link between business policies and process models; (2) a formal analysis of the changes among different process components and the potential corresponding change anomalies; (3) development of a unified process modeling language and the associated algorithms to support systematic process change management. Our research goal is to fill a critical void in the area of business process research and will have important impact on both theory and practice of business process management.

(This talk is based on the collaboration with my Ph.D. student Harry Wang, who will join the faculty at the University of Delaware in the fall of 2006.)

About the Speaker

Dr. J. Leon Zhao is Professor and Honeywell Fellow in MIS, University of Arizona. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and was an Assistant Professor in HKUST and College of William and Mary, respectively. He has published over 30 journal articles including Management Science, ISR, JMIS, CACM, Information Systems Frontier, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and Decision Support Systems. His work also appeared in over 60 refereed conference papers. Leon is an associate editor of Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, International Journal of Web and Grid Services, and International Journal of Web Services Research and serves on the editorial board of Journal of Database Management. He has co-edited seven special issues in various IS journals. Leon is a program co-chair for the Workshop on E-Business (2003) and the 15th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (2005) and the IEEE Conference on Services Computing (2006). He has served on over 30 program committees (or tracks/minitracks) in international conferences/workshops. He is visiting Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during the Spring Semester of 2006.

We look forward to welcome you at this Research Talk.