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The aspect‐oriented (AO) paradigm is first proposed to deal with programing modularity issues, but different researchers have been exploring AO concepts in the designing and definition of software systems. The goal of this paper is to discuss and present a proposal that addresses the application of AO concepts to the design of business processes (BPs) in order to improve usability and understandability of process models.

The paper departs from previous work on analyzing the application of AO for software design. The observations were backed by a case study, which was used to illustrate the issues by means of examples.

The paper presents findings on important issues related to the integration of AO paradigm and BP modeling, such as crosscutting representation, crosscutting composition, quantification, and join point exposure.

The paper explores a new frontier: the application of AO concepts to the design of BPs. As of now, few works have explored this new view on process modularity. The paper claims that application of AO concepts to the design of BPs is important in the consideration of usability and understandability. Its contributions are also backed by a prototype process editor, CrossOryx, a web‐based editor for modeling process using AO concepts.

The aspect‐oriented paradigm provides mechanisms to modularize crosscutting concerns. Applying aspect‐oriented concepts in business process modeling raises the possibilities of modularization, but brings out several concerns related both to process and to product. This paper aims to provide an overview of the aspect‐oriented business process modeling area, point out the open issues and analyze possible solutions to such issues.

This paper is based on a research project, where real business process models from a large oil and gas organization were analyzed, re‐modeled and re‐analyzed to put the AO‐BPM approach in practice.

The paper indicates the need for more research on aspect‐orientation applied to business process models, backed by open issues that are faced in this research. The authors categorized the open issues as: aspects identification, elements used in the models, levels used to modularize business process models, assignment of aspects to organizational actors, and ways that an aspectized model can be generated or visualized. The authors listed initial thoughts on possible solutions that they foresee based on previous work in software engineering.

This paper is the first one in analyzing research questions facing AO‐BPM. By now there have just been papers focusing on presenting its understanding on how to apply the aspect‐orientation approach to solve business process models modularity issues as can be seen in the related works section. The paper's main contribution is making explicit the roadblocks that are faced and opening up new avenues of research on BPM modularization, in particular with respect to AO‐BPM.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between some aspect‐oriented metrics and aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort.

An exploratory case study was conducted using an open source aspect‐oriented software consisting of 76 aspects, and 13 aspect‐oriented metrics were investigated that measure different structural properties of an aspect: size, coupling, cohesion, and inheritance. In addition, different prediction models for aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort were built using different combinations of metrics' categories.

The results obtained from this study indicate statistically significant correlation between most of the size metrics and aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort. The cohesion metric was also found to be significantly correlated with the same. Moreover, it was observed that the best accuracy in aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort prediction can be achieved as a function of some size metrics.

Fault prediction helps software developers to focus their quality assurance activities and to allocate the needed resources for these activities more effectively and efficiently; thus improving software reliability. In literature, some aspect‐oriented metrics have been evaluated for aspect fault proneness prediction, but not for other fault‐related prediction problems such as aspect fault content and fixing effort.

This paper proposes solutions to problems related to the maintenance and update of already existing e‐learning courseware.

A structured approach in form of a reference model for the re‐engineering of existing educational material is presented. In this context, concepts already established in the area of aspect‐oriented programming are applied to deal with crosscutting concerns in e‐learning material. Finally, a software product line approach is proposed for the creation of new courseware using re‐engineered components.

It turns out that some aspects of the methodology developed for aspect‐oriented programming can also be used to restructure the existing e‐learning material in such a way that maintenance is eased and redundancy is significantly reduced. In addition, software product lines for e‐learning material provide a global framework for coordinating the re‐engineering and reuse of components.

The advantage of the proposed approach is that existing e‐learning standards and systems do not have to be modified or adapted.

Usually, courseware evolves during a longer period of time and its development does not start every time from zero. There is a high incentive for re‐engineering of existing courseware, since it constitutes in many cases the competitive advantage of companies or universities. However, up to now, little attention is paid to the maintenance and the efficient update of e‐learning material which is already there.

More and more organizations make parts of their information systems available to their business partners and often face integration and interoperability issues. To counter these problems, web services appeared as a promising technology to bridge the gap between organizations and their partners. While web services generally focus on the implementation of functional concerns (FC) such as ordering of goods, the reservation of flights, etc. also non‐functional concerns (NFC) such as security, reliable messaging, performance, and availability have to be addressed appropriately. The purpose of this paper is to identify web services' requirements.

In this paper the authors provide a survey on works in the area of NFCs in web services. After presenting a common terminology, the most important requirements in that context are presented. Further, the authors assess these works against the requirements.

The evaluation reveals that there is no approach that supports the requirements to a satisfying degree. Based on that, the authors motivate the need for a novel holistic approach to NFCs in web services.

The paper presents an extended version of one of the papers presented at iiWAS2010.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a representation scheme based on the i* strategic actor model to represent the process owner information and show how to incorporate this approach into the event driven process chain and Business Process Modeling Notation-BPMN meta-models and also into the aspect-oriented business process modeling (BPM) context.

The authors use a case study in a real setting to evaluate the proposal and a controlled experiment to get more evidence about its relevance.

The authors presented evidence both from a case study in a real-world library showing the importance of representing – previously unavailable – process owner information, and from an experiment which involved participants analyzing the same models of the case study, confirming the preliminary evidences. It is important to stress the recognition that the proposed representation provided more transparency, in terms of ownership, than the usual BPM models. These benefits are due to the combination of the aspect-oriented approach and the strategic actor model, providing ownership information in a more transparent way.

The authors not only argue the importance of clearly established process ownership, both of the core process and the aspectual process, but also the authors presented an approach to represent the actor involved in process and aspect ownership as an instantiation of the i* strategic actor. Using this approach, the process owner can be defined in terms of actors instead of the activities performed. It is also possible to define the aspect owner and to include the aspectual process concept in the business process model.

The purpose of this paper is to study an innovative rice value chain financing system (VCFS) established in Benin, to identify the determinants of producers and processors access to formal credit, both at intensive and extensive margins. It focuses on multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP) which connect producers and processors in need of credit to potential financial lenders.

The empirical analysis uses rich cross-sectional survey data collected in Northern Benin in 2018. The sample consists of 215 rice producers and 217 rice processors randomly selected through a multi-stage sampling and interviewed with structured questionnaires. The empirical models analyze the determinants of the likelihood to receive a credit and the amount of credit received. To account for the sample selection and censored nature of the main outcome variable, the study considers a Heckman two-stage model coupled with a Tobit model for robustness checks.

The study finds that the MSP are effective in increasing access to formal credit and the amount borrowed. Producers and processors who are members of the MSP are more likely to receive credit and, conditional on being approved for credit borrower, a larger amount. Other key factors that significantly explain access to credit include the use of soft guarantee for securing a loan, the degree of participation in the platform and demographic characteristics. These findings are consistent across the Heckman and Tobit models.

The study attempts to rigorously analyze the factors explaining producers and processors access to credit using cross-sectional survey data. But it has some limitations. The main limitation is the type of data used. Ideally, one would like to run a randomized control trial (RCT) to randomly assign participation in the MSP to causally estimate its impact of access to credit. The second-best option would be to have a panel data covering the period before and after the establishment of the platform. However, in the absence of an RCT or panel data, the study resorts to cross-sectional data and empirical models that account for sample selection bias and the censored nature of the credit received.

One of the key findings of the study is that participation in the MSP (through different value chain stages associations) increases access to formal credit. This highlights an important and effective mechanism, a well-coordinated value chains that integrated lenders, that policymakers can leverage to facilitate access to credit in the agricultural sector.

Access to credit is important to boost agricultural productivity and income. Hence, the findings of the study have social implications in terms of poverty reduction in rural areas.

The study contributes to earlier theories and empirical studies on the demand for credit. It focuses on an innovative VCFS, increasingly adopted in many developing countries, adds originality and value to the understanding of mechanisms to unlock agricultural actors’ access to credit in low-income countries.

Business process models, while primarily intended for process documentation, communication, and improvement, are often also used as input for developing process-oriented software systems (Ouyang et al., 2009). Ensuring correctness, handling complexity, and improving reusability and maintainability of business process models are important for all these goals. The purpose of this paper is to propose an aspect-oriented business process modeling and correctness controlling method based on Petri nets to satisfy these goals.

The aspect-oriented paradigm provides a proper mechanism to modularization, and thus reduces the complexity of models, and also improves reusability and maintainability. However, weaving aspects into base processes may bring in mistakes or errors. To ensure correctness of modeling, this paper presents a formal approach to modeling aspect-oriented business processes and a method to ensure modeling correctness. Petri net is used as the process modeling language and its analysis techniques are applied to analyze the correctness of modeling. Two types of correctness, specifically, aspect-aspect correctness and base-aspect correctness are analyzed. A real banking process model is studied systematically in the case study to evaluate the approach and the performance assessments are conducted to show the cost and effect of the approach.

Designing aspect-oriented business process models help organizations reusing the model elements to reduce redundancy of their model repository, improving their maintainability, and supporting them to adapt to the changes of business requirements with flexible modeling. It is important to stress that the correctness of business process modeling is important in ensuring the quality of the models, especially in the safety-critical business domains, such as financial business domain.

In this paper, separation of concerns is used to separate the cross-cutting activities and core activities in accordance with the different functions of these activities, and an approach to modeling aspect-oriented business processes is proposed. First, the cross-cutting activities are encapsulated as aspects, while core business activities are modeled as base processes. Then, according to the correctness requirements of business process models, based on the weaving mechanisms of aspect-oriented approach, weaving correctness is defined. Weaving correctness controlling methods between multi-aspects and between aspects and base processes are designed. Errors or mistakes of aspect-oriented business process modeling are prevented during the procedure of modeling to ensure error-free business process modeling.

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of business processes (BPs) literature by identifying and discussing key BP‐related research themes and suggesting directions for future research.

Latent semantic analysis was used to analyze the abstracts of academic articles related to BP. Over 2,700 articles that use the term “business process (BP)” in their title, abstract or keywords were identified through electronic journals database EBSCOHost and examined.

The results clearly indicate growing interest in BP research during the past 20 years. The key research themes can be classified into core and associated BP research. Core BP research deals with four cornerstones of BP change: BP design, information technology, BP implementation, and ongoing BP management. The associated BP research lies on the intersection of BP and other research areas such as total quality management, supply chain management, e‐commerce, etc.

There is a need to focus future research efforts on understanding the inter‐relationships among the four identified cornerstones of BP change. There is also a need for more inter‐disciplinary BP research and integration of BP‐related organizational practices.

The review offers a cross‐disciplinary perspective on BP research. The proposed framework can be used to identify directions for future research and practice.

In Michael Lipsky’s intriguing analysis of the performance of public bureaucracy – in his classic Street-level Bureaucracy (1980) – he shows, for example, the professional discretion they apply may not only involve adapting policy to the individual case, meet real needs in the population, prevent patients, clients, students or users from getting access, etc., but at the same time both have profound policy implications and take very ‘political’ forms. In this chapter, I argue that it is regrettable that Lipsky did not establish a comparative framework for his study. Based on my own ethnographic research in local politics and bureaucratic practice in the municipal world in Norway, I look more closely at the relative autonomy of street-level bureaucracy within the context of universalism – a hallmark of the Nordic welfare state model (Esping-Andersen 1998, 2009) – and explore how it is utilised. The Nordic welfare states are among the most ‘service intense’ states in the Western world, and the personnel working directly with patients, students, clients, etc., play a major role in linking ‘the state’ to the population (Papakostas, 2001, Vike et al., 2002). Thus, the role of the Nordic welfare state’s street-level bureaucracy as a key interface between the state and the population is hard to overestimate (Leira & Sainsbury, 1994). Moreover, as universalism also tends to stimulate what we may call a culture of strong claims (to services) among the population at large, street-level bureaucrats may be able to form strong alliances with other actors, and thus play an important part of the dynamics of power in local politics – where fundamental policy principles such as universalism is at stake.