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The design and execution of business processes are important drivers of organizational performance. Organizations design their operations around cross-functional processes adopting business process management (BPM) methods, tools and systems. This often involves assigning BPM accountability to senior executives such as the chief operating officer (COO), chief information officer (CIO), or chief technology officer (CTO). Some organizations appoint a chief process officer (CPO), a phenomenon raising important questions about the skills and responsibilities of this position within the top management team. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical study to explore the skills and responsibilities of CPOs and differences to other executives.

The authors conducted an exploratory content analysis of job resumes from LinkedIn.com to investigate the skills and careers of individuals appointed as COO, CIO, CTO and CPO in organizations from different industries and sizes. The content analysis was complemented with expert interviews of CPOs to obtain rich insights into their perception of the responsibilities of this position.

CPOs possess a unique skill set to serve as change agents. Their skills enable them to serve as integrators and influencers across managerial ranks and corporate functions. COOs, CIOs and CTOs possess more specialized skills related to their corporate function, whereas CPOs are more generalists who facilitate process-oriented strategy and execution, driving cultural change throughout the organization. These findings are consistent across industry and size.

This is the first paper to examine the CPO position in relation to other senior executive positions. Hence, it addresses an important gap in the BPM literature which can help organizations to make informed decisions whether they need a CPO position or have it become a part-time role of one of their existing C-level positions.

This paper seeks to establish a design for cross‐organizational workflow based on logical channels of communication. A set of scenarios is established which can be used to test the effectiveness of future architectures.

Starting with scenarios based on cross‐organizational business transactions, designs a set of sequence diagrams, analyzes these diagrams, and then deduces the need for certain system capabilities.

Current approaches to web services focus on just one channel – that of invocation. In order to handle the full gamut of cross‐organizational workflow, channels devoted to flow, monitoring, negotiation, and interpersonal interaction are also necessary.

Extensions to this research might include designs for integrating these multiple channels. Such designs can be tested against the scenarios discussed in the paper. In particular, research related to the semantic web might extend the ideas raised here.

Companies implementing web services may want to augment the current technology with enhancement of their own in order to avoid inadvertently reducing their channels of communication with trading partners. A properly constructed monitoring channel has the potential to change the nature of complex workflow.

Those designing and implementing web service technology may find value in the articulation of a set of complex scenarios which can be used to test alternative designs and implementations. The discussion of cross‐organizational monitoring is new, and has broad implications for business.

Aims to discuss the development of workflow standards in the context of the internet.

Outlines the history behind process interoperability standards such as Wf‐XML and BPEL4WS.

Concludes that it will take a while for the dust to settle and the winners of the current standards battles to emerge.

Provides a useful source of information on workflow and web service standards.

Collaborative processes are relatively complex and are therefore difficult to handle. Representing the joint processes and capturing the interactions among stakeholders in a structured way are critical to improve the collaboration productivity. This paper aims to present a generic collaborative process model that improves on current approaches by explicitly representing the perspectives of stakeholders and their evolution traversing a work process.

This approach provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among tasks and stakeholders, and realizes collaboration through process management. A web‐based information system using the model to support collaborative process management is also described.

The research work provides collaboration management systems with the ability to analyze and control the processes through sharing perspectives.

The models and methods described in this paper are an important part of a pervasive, resilient and predictable means for business process management over the internet.

In the last decade, bureaucratic organizational hierarchies have been increasingly replaced with flatter organizational forms, bringing together people from different disciplines to form project teams within and between organizations. Distributed project teams often are self‐configuring networks of mobile and “fixed” people, devices, and applications. They are the natural next step in the evolution of distributed computing, after client‐server, web‐based, and peer‐to‐peer computing. Seeks to show that a newly emerging requirement is to facilitate not just mobility of content (i.e. to support a multitude of devices and connectivity modes) to project members, but also mobility of context (i.e. to provide traceable and continuous support of dynamic relationships between people, artifacts, and business processes).

The contribution of this paper is to present the design goals, the architecture, and implementation of a system aiming at supporting internet‐enabled workflow and groupware for project teams, enabling traceable and continuous support of associations (relationships) between people, artifacts, and business processes.

The findings indicate that building internet‐enabled workflow and groupware systems is valuable for virtual teamwork, since they provide a foundation for context‐aware and process‐aware information systems.

This article outlines some foundations of process‐aware collaborative work. Provides an analysis of current workflow and groupware shortcomings in respect of virtual teamwork, outlines the design goals, architecture and an implementation of a system aiming at supporting virtual teams on the internet.

Aims to show that workflow management needs to rethink its basis of discussion in order to meet today's challenges and to provide adequate IT support for heterogeneous workflow networks.

First, the need for flexibility in relating resources in workflow management is examined in more detail. Second, some approaches to managing workflows in heterogeneous networks are inspected and it is found that all of these improve flexibility on the basis of contracting services. Third, it is elaborated how processing by contract supports decentralized resource management through dynamically interrelating social and technical services driven by a cycle (“wheel”) of execution and monitoring, evaluation and demand, as well as selecting and contracting.

Conclusions are drawn for systems architecture and implementation to guide the design of internet‐enabled workflow support.

Important questions for the research agenda are: how can one enrich application‐oriented workflow modelling languages in order to describe processes as consisting of heterogeneous services? How should one design and implement workflow engines which enable the turning of the “wheel” with the support of integrating human activities and technical agency as workflow process services?

The idea of processing by contract may lead to new workflow concepts and technology to meet the challenges of an internet economy based on the “pay as you go” principle.

Whereas the workflow paradigm of the past may be phrased as processing by definition, i.e. process execution according to predefined process patterns and resource relations, the idea of processing by contract is suggested, i.e. a mode of process execution driven by recurrent process evaluation and service contracting.

Human resource allocation is considered a relevant problem in business process management (BPM). The successful allocation of available resources for the execution of process activities can impact on process performance, reduce costs and obtain a better productivity of the resources. In particular, process mining is an emerging discipline that allows improvement of the resource allocation based on the analysis of historical data. The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad review of primary studies published in the research area of human resource allocation in BPM and process mining.

A systematic mapping study (SMS) was conducted in order to classify the proposed approaches to allocate human resources. A total of 2,370 studies published between January 2005 and July 2016 were identified. Through a selection protocol, a group of 95 studies were selected.

Human resource allocation is an emerging research area that has been evolving over time, generating new proposals that are increasingly applied to real case studies. The majority of proposed approaches relate to the period 2011-2016. Journals and conference proceedings are the most common venues. Validation research and evaluation research are the most common research types. There are two main evaluation methods: simulation and case studies.

This study aims to provide an initial assessment of the state of the art in the research area of human resource allocation in BPM and process mining. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that has been conducted to date that generates a SMS in this research area.

A configurable reference model can be used to assist in the development and management of business processes in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a process design in such environments via configurable process reference modelling, using airports as an example.

Existing reference modelling methods around process modelling, merging and configuration are extended to include contextual and spatial factors using the design science methodology. The approach is empirically based on a set of business process management notation (BPMN) models for international passenger departures, consolidated from five Australian airport case studies via document analysis, interviews and observation.

The use of contextual factors and operational scenarios, structured using the proposed approach, facilitated efficient cross-organisational comparison for configuring processes to suit the needs of a target organisation. The resulting configurable model integrates the perspectives of organisational stakeholder groups with that of the customer in a transparent and unambiguous graphical representation. It is a reusable tool with low data collection needs for each use.

Future research should include: version management; how to keep the model current; configurability via modelling objects other than gateways; and cross-discipline application (e.g. as a foundation for quantitative decision-making models).

This is the first reported application of configurable reference modelling to airport passenger facilitation. Methodological contributions include the addition of space-sensitive process elements and notation to BPMN; guidelines for systematically deriving contextual factors associated with process variants across similar organisations; and overall normative guidelines for inductively developing a configurable process reference model.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the state-of-the-art in research on process owners, a key role within business process management and process governance, and thus to increase our understanding of the role of process owners.

The author conducts a systematic literature review of research shedding light on the role of process owners. The review includes 100 academic papers and 10 books on BPM.

Findings from the review demonstrate the significance of appointing process owners and showcase process owners’ role and responsibilities, as well as obstacles to and enablers of effective process ownership.

Based on the findings from the review, the author proposes a comprehensive framework on process ownership. The review provides a knowledge base for future research to build upon and can serve as a guide for practitioners. The review also identifies several research gaps and opportunities for future research.