Search results

Despite corporate communications having an immense impact on corporate success, there is a lack of dedicated techniques for their management and visualization. A potential strategy is to apply business process management (BPM) approach with business process model and notation (BPMN) modeling techniques.

The goal of this study was to gain empirical insights into the cognitive effectiveness of BPMN-based corporate communications modeling. To this end, experimental research was performed in which subjects tested two modeling notations – standardized BPMN conversation diagrams and a BPMN extension with corporate communications-specific concepts.

Standard conversation diagrams were demonstrated to be more time-efficient for designing and interpreting diagrams. However, the subjects made significantly fewer mistakes when interpreting the diagrams modeled in the BPMN extension. Subjects also evolved positive perceptions toward the proposed extension.

BPMN-based corporate communications modeling may be applied to organizations to depict how formal communications are or should be performed consistently, effectively and transparently by following and integrating with BPM approaches and modeling techniques.

The paper provides empirical insights into the cognitive effectiveness of corporate communications modeling based on BPMN and positions the corresponding models into typical process architecture.

Business process modelling integrates and visualizes relevant information essential for managing day-to-day business operations. It plays a critical role in the design and execution of business transformations. Recognizing the role of process modelling, a large number of modelling languages, methods and techniques have been developed, each offering diverse advantages and having inherent limitations. Traditional and popular process modelling approaches focus on the exact specification of the control flow of business processes, whereas more recent approaches like Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) are focused on the communication between process participants. This study aims to provide comparative insights about these two approaches through their experimental application. This study does so by comparing Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN); a control flow approach, with S-BPM; a communication approach, with a specific focus on their suitability for novice modellers.

This paper reports on an exploratory experiment that compares BPMN to S-BPM. Applying cognitive load theory, this study compares the experiences and outcomes of novice process modellers, assessing perceived ease of use, model quality (syntactic and semantic) and modelling efficiency (time to model) across the two approaches.

Study results show that S-BPM (a communication approach) led to significantly better user performances for process modelling than BPMN (a control flow approach). This study points to how a different modelling approach such as S-BPM could be either considered as an alternative or to complement the more popular control flow approach BPMN. This observation was especially relevant for modelling contexts where domain experts are novice process modellers.

This study provides the first empirical evidence that communication approaches like S-BPM could outperform modelling approaches which are control-flow based (i.e. BPMN), especially when being used by novice process modellers who hold the domain and process knowledge. This study uses this as a springboard to present important considerations for practice and guide future process modelling research.

An important factor which greatly affects the output and effectiveness of an organisation is the emotional attitude of members of the organisation to their colleagues and to their work. Management is continually concerned with the process of collecting and categorising data, so that policy can be constructed, promulgated and executed. At all stages in these tasks, good communication and co‐operation are essential and the failure to carry through a particular plan satisfactorily is likely to give rise to real doubts about the state of co‐operation and communication within the organisation.

This paper aims to discuss the process of building a 24×7 reference platform for facilitating the farmers with the easy access of information at any time from any location. It takes the text string as input and process it to respond with the desired result to the user.

An interactive Web-based chatbot named as AgriRef was developed using free version of Dialogflow. The intents were defined based on the conversation flow diagram. Furthermore, the application was integrated with website on local server and telegram application.

With this chatbot application, the farmers will able to get answers of their queries. It provides the human-like conversational interface to the farmers. It will also be useful for librarians of agricultural libraries to save time in answering common queries.

This paper describes the various steps involved in developing the chatbot application using Dialogflow.

This paper reviews existing business process (BP) modeling languages that are widely used in the industry as well as recent research work on modeling and analysis of BPs in the service-oriented environment and Internetware-based software paradigm. BPs in such environment are different from traditional BPs due to loose coupling of partner services, dynamic and on-the-fly selection of partners and run-time process adaptability. The unique characteristics of these BPs require formal modeling of the requirements and constraints in each phase of their life cycle, including design phase, implementation and deployment phase and execution phase.

The paper first provides a categorization of typical user requirements in each phase of the BP life cycle. Then a detailed comparison of the selected languages with respect to their requirement modeling and analysis capabilities in each of the identified categories is provided. The paper also discusses new requirements engineering research challenges arising from future software needs and emerging trends in software engineering in the context of Web-services-based BPs and Internetware.

There is a need to have a framework that provides support for user requirements modeling and analysis for all the phases of BP life cycle in an integrated manner. Such a framework would be useful not only in resolving the inconsistencies between requirements across phases but also in addressing the issues related to BP evolution due to changes in user requirements over time. Moreover, with the Internet of things (IoT) adoption in BPM, there is a need to have an integrated environment that provides support for capturing the resilience requirements of enterprise BPs as well as the mobility constraints of the underlying IoT devices.

This paper reviews existing BP modeling languages and frameworks and discusses the new requirements engineering research challenges arising from future software needs and the emerging trends in BP management in the service-oriented environment and Internetware-based software paradigm.

The paper aims to examine high school students' use of social networking to participate in teledeliberative democratic dialogue and explicates the implications of this dialogue for democratic education that is inclusive of all students.

The case study analyzes the comments of 111 high school students over ten days following what they perceived to be an injustice committed by the administration against one of their fellow classmates.

Analysis of student commentary led to the development of three categories of teledeliberative citizenship: the demagogue, the proselyte, and the egalitarian. Together, these categories serve as a spectrum of sophistication along which democratic discourse can be classified.

The primary limitation of this research is a product of the online medium in which it occurs. Though “observing” students' interactions on Web 2.0 application was beneficial for cataloguing conversations, social cues like body language and tone of voice had to be inferred.

Web 2.0 provides students with an opportunity to build a community of shared belief that crosses gender, racial, religious, and cultural divisions.

Teachers could use Web 2.0 as a forum for teledeliberative democratic dialogue in a multicultural democratic educational framework to engage students and encourage a sophisticated, active citizenship.

The purpose of this study is to examine questioning opportunities afforded by interactive whiteboards (IWBs) by highlighting pedagogical decisions enacted by teachers to ensure that they work with the wider affordances of the device.

Three primary/elementary teachers participated in a study designed to identify the types of questions that teachers could enable, sustain and afford with an IWB. The teachers selected lessons to be videotaped. Pre- and post-lessons interviews were held with each teacher. Pre-lesson interviews sought the intent of the lesson and intended use of the IWB. Post-lesson interviews included teachers reviewing videotapes of the lessons and teachers reflecting on, reviewing and explaining significant and key events. They provided their reasons and justification behind their informed choices.

Teachers enacted a framework that demonstrated their commitment to developing communities of learners. They sought strategic ways to utilise the IWB in dialogically focussed classrooms. Teachers used IWBs to sustain conversations that raise and resolve their learners’ questions, to present challenges to the group.

This study has a small number of participants, but is fine-grained in analysis. The recorded lessons have only occurred in mathematics classes. Lesson sequences are short, and a longer sequence, over eight weeks, would have also been illuminating.

The study is unique in showing the shift in power and ownership between interactions among the teacher, students and the IWB.

The purpose of this paper is to explore shared workspace and professional learning community (PLC) interactions in schools. The collaborative culture and PLCs were parts of the school culture. The collaborative culture of each school was designed to ensure teachers share intellectual and physical contributions in learning to investigate the impact of teaching and learning on students. The workspace overlap for teachers was part of the culture of each school and a function of the PLC interactions. PLCs provided opportunities for collaboration and therefore opportunities to share intellectual and physical workspace.

A grounded theory research approach was taken to this investigation, primarily because of the common experiences of educators in schools (Creswell, 2013). Collaborative process between educators in schools was qualitatively investigated as a function of PLC interactions. In all, three communities, five schools, and 70 educators were purposefully selected to participate. Data were collected, including semi-structured interviews, observations, artifacts, and researcher field notes.

The workspace interactions include shared leadership, decision making, teaching and learning practice, and accountability measures. Attributes and characteristics of effective collaboration and PLCs greatly affect the outcomes of PLCs. An emergent framework is provided that includes attributes of effective collaboration and the characteristics of effective PLCs that merge into intellectual and physical shared workspace.

This paper focuses on the connections between PLCs, school culture, and professional educator collaboration. This paper proposes to provide a unique model called the shared workspace. The model combines the intellectual and physical aspects of group members to ensure the effectiveness of collaborative systems that promote quality practice in schools through functional PLCs as part of a positive school culture. This paper further offers extensions to the shared leadership concept (Carpenter, 2015) in how schools, administrators, and teachers should work together, thus more collaboratively through a continuous improvement process of the school as a workplace and a learning organization.

The purpose of this paper is to present business process point analysis (BPPA), a technique to measure business functional process size, based on function point analysis (FPA), and using business process model and notation (BPMN). This paper also discusses the assessment results of BPPA compared with FPA.

Two experimental studies with participants from academia and industry were conducted. The following aspects in the experimental studies were focused: similarity, application easiness, feasibility, and application benefits. The purpose of the experiment was to assess BPPA comparing with FPA as the BPPA design followed the FPA pattern.

Experimental results showed that both academia and industry groups highly rated similarity and application benefits for BPPA compared with FPA. However, only participants from industry highly rated BPPA for application easiness and feasibility. The results also showed that participants’ previous experiences did not influence their ratings on BPPA.

BPPA helps project managers to measure functional process size of business process management projects. As BPPA is derived from FPA, its mechanism is easily recognizable by project managers who are used to FPA. These results also show that both techniques are in most cases considered rather similar.