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Event-Driven Business Process Management: where are we now? : A comprehensive synthesis and analysis of literature

Julian Krumeich (Institute for Information Systems, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Benjamin Weis (Institute for Information Systems, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Dirk Werth (Institute for Information Systems, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Peter Loos (Institute for Information Systems, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany)

Business Process Management Journal

ISSN: 1463-7154

Article publication date: 1 July 2014

2989

Abstract

Purpose

The business operations of today's enterprises are heavily influenced by numerous of internal and external business events. With the Event Driven Architecture and particularly the Complex Event Processing (CEP), the technology required for identifying complex correlations in these large amounts of event data right after its appearance has already emerged. The resulting gain in operational transparency builds the foundation for (near) real-time reactions. This motivated extensive research activities especially in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), which essentially coined the term Event-Driven BPM (EDBPM). Now, several years after the advent of this new concept, the purpose of this paper is to shed light to the question: where are we now on our way towards a sophisticated adoption of the CEP technology within BPM?

Design/methodology/approach

The research methodology of this paper is a structured literature analysis. It basically follows the procedure proposed by vom Brocke et al. (2009). This verified five-step process – entitled “Reconstructing the giant” – allowed a rigorous study. As a result, various research clusters were derived, whose state-of-the-art exposed existing research gaps within EDBPM.

Findings

First of all, the paper provides a concise conceptual basis on different application possibilities of EDBPM. Afterwards, it synthesizes current research into six clusters and highlights most significant work within them. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to tackle existing research gaps to pave the way towards fully realizing the potentials of the paradigm.

Originality/value

So far, a comparable study of the current state-of-the-art within EDBPM is non-existent. The findings of this paper, e.g. the proposed research agenda, help scholars to focus their research efforts on specific aspects that need to be considered in order to advance the adoption of the CEP technology within BPM.

Keywords

Citation

Krumeich, J., Weis, B., Werth, D. and Loos, P. (2014), "Event-Driven Business Process Management: where are we now? : A comprehensive synthesis and analysis of literature", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 615-633. https://doi.org/10.1108/BPMJ-07-2013-0092

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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