Business Process Management

Abstract

Since we hosted the first International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) in Eindhoven in 2003, our discipline has changed dramatically.Together with Mathias Weske and Arthur ter Hofstede, I edited the first volume.In 2004, Mathias Weske organized the second BPM conference in Potsdam.Since then the BPM field matured and adapted to the rapid developments in IT.The book "Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures" can be viewed as a "classic" in the field of BPM.The first edition of the book was published in 2007 and had a strong focus on modeling and automation.Over time the book has been updated to reflect the developments in BPM.The fourth version discusses Robotic Process Automation (the "poor man's workflow management system" as I like to refer to it), declarative process modeling approaches, more attention for data modeling, and, of course, process mining.For example, the book now also discusses the discovery of Directly Follows Graphs (DFGs).Let me take this opportunity to mention trends that I consider to be important for anyone working on BPM.First of all, process mining will continue to be at the center of BPM to address fundamental questions about actual vs. assumed processes, identifying bottlenecks and deviations, and predicting performance and conformance problems.Process mining, as we know it today, has successfully bridged the gap between process science and data science.Second, case-driven process mining will be replaced by object-centric process mining.In case-driven process mining, an activity is executed for a case at a specific point in time.This aligns well with mainstream process modeling languages like Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).However, as the field of process mining is maturing, it becomes evident that this is an oversimplification of reality.Object-Centric Event Data (OCED) generalizes the traditional notion of event data in several ways, e.g., each event may refer to any number of objects, and objects may be involved in any number of events.These are the so-called event-to-object relations.Moreover, objects may be related through object-to-object relations.Using standards such as OCEL VII