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1 – 10 of over 121000Florian Johannsen, Susanne Leist and Reinhold Tausch
The purpose of this paper is to specify the decomposition conditions of Wand and Weber for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Therefore, an interpretation of the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to specify the decomposition conditions of Wand and Weber for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Therefore, an interpretation of the conditions for BPMN is derived and compared to a specification of the conditions for enhanced Event-Driven Process Chains (eEPCs). Based on these results, guidelines for a conformance check of BPMN and eEPC models with the decomposition conditions are shown. Further, guidelines for decomposition are formulated for BPMN models. The usability of the decomposition guidelines is tested with modelling experts.
Design/methodology/approach
An approach building on a representational mapping is used for specifying the decomposition conditions. Therefore, ontological constructs of the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology are mapped to corresponding modelling constructs and an interpretation of the decomposition conditions for BPMN is derived. Guidelines for a conformance check are then defined. Based on these results, decomposition guidelines are formulated. Their usability is tested in interviews.
Findings
The research shows that the decomposition conditions stemming from the information systems discipline can be transferred to business process modelling. However, the interpretation of the decomposition conditions depends on specific characteristics of a modelling language. Based on a thorough specification of the conditions, it is possible to derive guidelines for a conformance check of process models with the conditions. In addition, guidelines for decomposition are developed and tested. In the study, these are perceived as understandable and helpful by experts.
Research limitations/implications
Research approaches based on representational mappings are subjected to subjectivity. However, by having three researchers performing the approach independently, subjectivity can be mitigated. Further, only ten experts participated in the usability test, which is therefore to be considered as a first step in a more comprising evaluation.
Practical implications
This paper provides the process modeller with guidelines enabling a conformance check of BPMN and eEPC process models with the decomposition conditions. Further, guidelines for decomposing BPMN models are introduced.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to specify Wand and Weber's decomposition conditions for process modelling with BPMN. A comparison to eEPCs shows, that the ontological expressiveness influences the interpretation of the conditions. Further, guidelines for decomposing BPMN models as well as for checking their adherence to the decomposition conditions are presented.
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Dipty Tripathi, Shreya Banerjee and Anirban Sarkar
Business process workflow is a design conceptualization to automate the sequence of activities to achieve a business goal with involved participants and a predefined set of rules…
Abstract
Purpose
Business process workflow is a design conceptualization to automate the sequence of activities to achieve a business goal with involved participants and a predefined set of rules. Regarding this, a formal business workflow model is a prime requisite to implement a consistent and rigorous business process. In this context, majority of the existing research works are formalized structural features and have not focused on functional and behavioral design aspects of business processes. To address this problem, this paper aims to propose a formal model of business process workflow called as business process workflow using typed attributed graph (BPWATG) enriched with structural, functional and behavioral characteristics of business processes.
Design/methodology/approach
Typed attributed graph (ATG) and first-order logic have been used to formalize proposed BPWATG to provide rigorous syntax and semantics towards business process workflows. This is an effort to execute a business workflow on an automated machine. Further, the proposed BPWATG is illustrated using a case study to show the expressiveness of proposed model. Besides, the proposed graph is initially validated using generic modelling environment (GME) case tool. Moreover, a comparative study is performed with existing formal approaches based on several crucial features to exhibit the effectiveness of proposed BPWATG.
Findings
The proposed model is capable of facilitating structural, functional and behavioral aspects of business process workflows using several crucial features such as dependency conceptualization, timer concepts, exception handling and deadlock detection. These features are used to handle real-world problems and ensure the consistency and correctness of business workflows.
Originality/value
BPWATG is proposed to formalize a business workflow that is required to make a model of business process machine-readable. Besides, formalizations of dependency conceptualization, exception handling, deadlock detection and time-out concepts are specified. Moreover, several non-functional properties (reusability, scalability, flexibility, dynamicity, reliability and robustness) are supported by the proposed model.
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Kendra Abkowitz Brooks and James Clarke
The purpose of this paper is to describe a risk-based methodology developed to identify the severity of impacts to various types of infrastructure located within the Tennessee…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe a risk-based methodology developed to identify the severity of impacts to various types of infrastructure located within the Tennessee State Park system when exposed to extreme weather events. Infrastructure systems, composed of various assets, are central to the economic, environmental and cultural functioning of the society. Understanding the potential impacts to these assets from various threats is fundamental to prudent strategic, operational and financial decision-making. Among infrastructure, systems of interest are those managed and operated by park services. Such systems are particularly exposed to extreme weather, given the recreational activities that they provide.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper describes a risk-based methodology developed to identify the severity of impacts to various types of infrastructure located within the Tennessee State Park system when exposed to extreme weather events. It consists of the following steps: identifying extreme weather event types experienced in Tennessee; assessing damage to various types of park system infrastructure caused by these events; and deriving an overall impact score associated with specific types of park system infrastructure when exposed to certain types of extreme weather scenarios.
Findings
In applying this methodology, tornadic events were found to be most impactful, whereas drought and heat events had the least effect on park infrastructure. Dining and lodging infrastructure were found to incur the most damage, regardless of the weather event type.
Originality/value
The approach as described in this paper is transferable to other park systems as well as public sector assets in general.
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Qing Zou and Eun G. Park
This study aims to explore a way of representing historical collections by examining the features of an event in historical documents and building an event-based ontology model.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore a way of representing historical collections by examining the features of an event in historical documents and building an event-based ontology model.
Design/methodology/approach
To align with a domain-specific and upper ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) model is adopted. Based on BFO, an event-based ontology for historical description (EOHD) is designed. To define events, event-related vocabularies are taken from the Library of Congress’ event types (2012). The three types of history and six kinds of changes are defined.
Findings
The EOHD model demonstrates how to apply the event ontology to biographical sketches of a creator history to link event types.
Research limitations/implications
The EOHD model has great potential to be further expanded to specific events and entities through different types of history in a full set of historical documents.
Originality/value
The EOHD provides a framework for modeling and semantically reforming the relationships of historical documents, which can make historical collections more explicitly connected in Web environments.
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Wiljeana J. Glover, Wen‐Hsing Liu, Jennifer A. Farris and Eileen M. Van Aken
Despite the increased adoption and reported benefits of kaizen event (KE) programs, there is a lack of empirical research documenting their design, implementation and outcomes, as…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite the increased adoption and reported benefits of kaizen event (KE) programs, there is a lack of empirical research documenting their design, implementation and outcomes, as well as what designs may be more vs less effective. This paper aims to present an empirical study describing the characteristics, including outcomes achieved, program attributes, and implementation problems, of 16 established KE programs. Although this study is primarily exploratory and descriptive, the goal is to identify areas for future research, including attributes that appear to support or detract from program success, and the outcomes and implementation problems experienced.
Design/methodology/approach
Using semi‐structured interviews, qualitative data were collected to characterize established KE programs in 16 manufacturing, service, and government organizations. The data were examined using content analysis to identify the most frequent codes for each characteristic, which were then compared to KE program characteristics synthesized from a systematic review of published KE sources. Based on this, a set of propositions were identified to guide future research on KE programs.
Findings
The majority of the 16 organizations reported successful programs, although there was noted variation in organization success. The organizations also neglected to measure many aspects of program success which they considered to be highly important, in particular, human resource outcomes. In addition, the organizations appeared to struggle with sustainability and believe that sustainability problems could threaten long‐term KE program viability. Other potentially influential factors include the types of processes targeted, event types, catalysts for events, and KE resources. The findings were used to develop propositions for future research in these and other specific areas.
Practical implications
The study provides a better understanding of the characteristics of established KE programs, as well as common areas in need of improvement even in these programs, and can be used by practitioners in establishing or improving their KE programs.
Originality/value
By documenting established KE programs across organizations and comparing actual practices to published sources, this study contributes to the development of KE theory and also provides direction for future empirical research.
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Junsheng Zhang, Yunchuan Sun and Changqing Yao
This paper aims to semantically linking scientific research events implied by scientific and technical literature to support information analysis and information service…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to semantically linking scientific research events implied by scientific and technical literature to support information analysis and information service applications. Literature research is an important method to acquire scientific and technical information which is important for research, development and innovation of science and technology. It is difficult but urgently required to acquire accurate, timely, rapid, short and comprehensive information from the large-scale and fast-growing literature, especially in the big data era. Existing literature-based information retrieval systems focus on basic data organization, and they are far from meeting the needs of information analytics. It becomes urgent to organize and analyze scientific research events related to scientific and technical literature for forecasting development trend of science and technology.
Design/methodology/approach
Scientific literature such as a paper or a patent is represented as a scientific research event, which contains elements including when, where, who, what, how and why. Metadata of literature is used to formulate scientific research events that are implied in introduction and related work sections of literature. Named entities and research objects such as methods, materials and algorithms can be extracted from texts of literature by using text analysis. The authors semantically link scientific research events, entities and objects, and then, they construct the event space for supporting scientific and technical information analysis.
Findings
This paper represents scientific literature as events, which are coarse-grained units comparing with entities and relations in current information organizations. Events and semantic relations among them together formulate a semantic link network, which could support event-centric information browsing, search and recommendation.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed model is a theoretical model, and it needs to verify the efficiency in further experimental application research. The evaluation and applications of semantic link network of scientific research events are further research issues.
Originality/value
This paper regards scientific literature as scientific research events and proposes an approach to semantically link events into a network with multiple-typed entities and relations. According to the needs of scientific and technical information analysis, scientific research events are organized into event cubes which are distributed in a three-dimensioned space for easy-to-understand and information visualization.
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Zhengqi Guo, Matthew Hall and Leona Wiegmann
This study aims to examine whether and how voluntary accounting disclosures can repair individual donors’ trust in a charity after negative events.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine whether and how voluntary accounting disclosures can repair individual donors’ trust in a charity after negative events.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopt a qualitative research approach and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with active Australian individual donors, with a hypothetical vignette design. Hypothetical negative events and corresponding accounting disclosures are presented to participants during interviews.
Findings
Three types of individual donors are identified based on their decision-making patterns after negative events and primary trust relations with a charity-reasoned donor (giving-decision based on their analysis of the situation, competence-based trust), generalist donors (giving-decision based on trust in the charitable sector, institution-based trust) and emotional donors (giving-decision based on feelings and emotions about the charity, integrity-based trust). The research suggests that accounting disclosures can repair trust damage for reasoned donors and support institution-based trust for generalist donors, but do not seem able to repair trust damage for emotional donors and can potentially damage trust further.
Practical implications
Overall, the findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with individual donors after negative events is not likely to be very effective in repairing trust. Instead, charities may need to adapt disclosures to their different types of individual donors.
Originality/value
While prior accounting studies have largely focussed on how charity managers themselves grapple with accountability or how negative events impact charitable donations, the authors demonstrate how accounting disclosures can play different roles in the trust-repairing process for different types of individual donors.
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Brayden G King and Laura K. Nelson
Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced…
Abstract
Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced known and unknown biases into our measurement of social movements. We know that national newspapers tend to cover larger and more contentious events and organizations. Protest events are furthermore a small part of what social movements actually do. Without other readily available options to quantify social movements, however, big-N studies have continued to focus on protest events via a few large newspapers. With advances in digitized data and computational methods, we now no longer have to rely on large newspapers or focus only on protests to quantify important aspects of social movements. In this paper, we use the environmental movement as a case study, analyzing data from a wide range of local, regional, and national newspapers in the United States to quantify multiple facets of social movements. We argue that the incorporation of more data and new methods to quantify information in text has the potential to transform the way we both conceive of and measure social movements in three ways: (1) the type of focal social movement organization included, (2) the type of tactics and issues covered, and (3) the ability to go beyond protest events as the primary unit of analysis. In addition to demonstrating ways that the focus on counting protest events has introduced specific biases in the type of tactics, issues, and organizations covered in social movement research, we argue that computational methods can help us extract and count meaningful aspects of social movements well beyond event counts. In short, the infusion of new data and methods into social movements, peace, and conflict studies could lead us to a substantial shift in the way we quantify social movements, from protest events to everything that occurs outside of them.
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Vassilios Ziakas and Carla A. Costa
The purpose of this paper is to examine the inter‐organizational patterns of an events network that shape a host community's capacity to capitalize on its event portfolio.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the inter‐organizational patterns of an events network that shape a host community's capacity to capitalize on its event portfolio.
Design/methodology/approach
Network analysis was employed to measure the relationships within an events network. The network included nine organizations that participated in the organization of the host community's event portfolio. Data were collected using an instrument adapted from Provan et al. and analyzed using the statistical software for social network analysis, UCINET. Four types of links were measured (shared information, shared resources, help sent, and help received) as well as attitudes toward trust and collaboration.
Findings
Results showed that collaboration was not consistent across all types of links. The most central organizations in the network were the Tourism Department and the Chamber. Shared information was the predominant type of link with other types of links being weaker resulting in low multiplexity scores. Reciprocity among existing links was above average. Finally, the organizations appeared to have high levels of trust and positive attitudes toward collaboration.
Research limitations/implications
An events network can be studied as a measurable mechanism assessing community capacity building in event management and explicating the collaboration patterns in event portfolios that facilitate the joint use of an integrated set of resources for sport and cultural events.
Practical implications
Network analysis can be employed to explore and assess the nature, patterns, and effectiveness of inter‐organizational relationships affecting event planning, implementation, and leveraging.
Originality/value
The paper demonstrates the usefulness of network analysis as a tool for host communities to help build their capacity in event management through the development of local networks. It also suggests that the study of event portfolios provides a suitable context for future research to examine community capacity building in terms of fostering the necessary relationships and synergies to plan, implement, and leverage a series of different events.
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Andrew Smith, Goran Vodicka, Alba Colombo, Kristina N. Lindstrom, David McGillivray and Bernadette Quinn
There are two main aims of this conceptual paper. The first is to explore the issues associated with staging events in public spaces, and to produce a typology of different event…
Abstract
Purpose
There are two main aims of this conceptual paper. The first is to explore the issues associated with staging events in public spaces, and to produce a typology of different event spaces. The second is to explore if and how events should be designed into parks, streets and squares and whether this might reduce some of the negative impacts and associated user conflicts.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper analyses the history, drivers and effects of using public spaces as venues and examines the reciprocal relationships between events and the spaces that host them. To explain the range and dynamics of contemporary events, a typology of event spaces is developed. This typology highlights nine different types of event spaces which are differentiated by the level of public accessibility (free entry, sometimes free, paid entry), and the mobility of event audiences (static, limited mobility, mobile). Using this typology, the paper discusses ways that public spaces might be adapted to make them better suited to staging events. This discussion is illustrated by a range of examples.
Findings
The paper finds that it makes practical sense to adapt some urban public spaces to make them better equipped as venues, but designing in events presents new issues and does not necessarily resolve many of the problems associated with staging events. Disputes over events are inevitable and constituent features of public spaces.
Originality/value
This paper makes an original contribution by developing a new classification of event spaces and by synthesising ideas from urban design with ideas from the events literature.
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