Seattle, Washington, Week of July 31-Aug 4, 1994.
Description of Workshop:
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is concerned with achieving order of magnitude increases in performance through a complete redesign of business processes. This workshop will focus on the roles of AI in the design phase of business process reengineering, encompassing recent research on AI tools for assisting in process design. This workshop is intended to foster discussion of different roles for AI in BPR, stimulating interaction between the AI research community and people with experience in BPR efforts.
Topics:
A promising area for AI in supporting BPR in the design phase are: supporting modeling of holistic aspects of a business like goals, strategies and capabilities; supporting process modeling; generating innovative process models; performing gap analysis through a combination of qualitative and quantitative simulations; and tying the abstract with the detailed models.
At least three related approaches to modeling are currently being explored. The first of these is knowledge-based simulation, in which the objective is to produce a quantitative or stochastic simulation of a business process. AI technology provides the knowledge-based environment in which designers can specify the model in terms of components and connections, using varying levels of structural and type hierarchies, to construct models that are then used to support simulation. Knowledge-based simulation has demonstrated its value in commercial tools and research projects. An alternative to simulation is symbolic evaluation, in which a causal model of a process in terms of the behavior of its constituent elements is analyzed to produce characterizations of its global behavior without simulation.
Finally, qualitative modeling and analysis of processes is a good technique to use for models when the data needed for quantitative or stochastic analysis is not available. This approach is illustrated by systems which perform qualitative analysis of financial entities. Such systems support the process of constructing a business model that incorporates goals, policies and constraints, and a business process model that incorporates tasks and decisions. The process of evolving the business models and associated business processes leads to redesigning of the business.
Each of these techniques, however, has its limitations: the limited inferential power of purely qualitative reasoning is well documented, symbolic evaluation is often intractable unless the form of the model is carefully controlled, and knowledge-based simulation ultimately relies on simulation techniques that presume the availability of quantitative data that may be simply unavailable. Research efforts in all of these areas have in common the need to balance the difficulty of acquiring and constructing the process model against the need to produce reliable and informative results from analysis.
An orthogonal dimension of concerns in business process modeling arises from the fact that nearly all BPR design efforts involve collaborative effort across organizational boundaries, and both modeling an enterprise "as is" and "to be" result in large and complex models, forcing serious issues of scalability and knowledge management to be addressed.
Format of Workshop:
The workshop will be a half-day. To stimulate intensive discussion, invited authors will be given a substantial time slot, followed by a short time slot for a respondent who will have prepared a commentary on the preceding presentation.
Attendance and submission requirements:
Attendees may either submit three copies of a technical abstract of up to five pages, or a shorter position paper describing the author's interest in the workshop topic. Invitations to make presentations will go to submissions based on relevance to the workshop topic, technical contribution, and clarity of presentation. Demonstrations of live programs in support of technical presentations are strongly encouraged. Position papers of one to two pages may be submitted in lieu of technical abstracts. Some attendees will be asked to serve as respondents for accepted presentations. Fax submissions are discouraged; hardcopy is acceptable; E-mail is preferred. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to provide camera ready copies.
Submission Deadline: March 18, 1994. Notification Date: April 8, 1994. Final date for camera-ready copies to organizers: April 29, 1994
Submit to:
Walter Hamscher Price Waterhouse Technology Centre 68 Willow Road Menlo Park, CA 94025 Tel: (415) 688-6669 Fax: (415) 617-7869 Net: Walter_Hamscher@notes.pw.com
Workshop Committee:
Walter Hamscher (Price Waterhouse; Walter_Hamscher @ notes.pw.com) and Pramod Jain (Andersen Consulting; pramod @ andersen.com), co-chairs; Robert Friedenberg (Inference Corporation; robert @ inference.com), Gerry Williams (Andersen Consulting; Gerry_Williams @ qm.andersen.com), Dorothy Yu (Coopers and Lybrand).