Part 5: Participation and eServices ; International audience ; Many discussions enforce the need to encourage Society's involvement and participation in public issues. This paper moves towards the idea that the use of conversations about public services encourages closer ties between Society and Government. It presents a tool to support discussion and share of information about public service processes. The tool also enables the use of information obtained from conversations to identify service improvements.
PurposeThis research work aims to expose the detailed construction of a framework for translation between Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) and a citizen process language, named GERAL, so that BPMN and modeling non-experts can publicize their procedural information in an understandable and quality manner. The artifact is built in detail through epistemological rigor derived from empirical evidence and best practices related to the topic of understanding business processes, both based on well-established literature on the subject.Design/methodology/approachIn the case of research involving the construction of an artifact, the design science research (DSR) methodology was used to conduct engineering with an emphasis on the scientific method; for evaluation, the authors used the case study methodology. Data collection is based on documentation analysis, questionnaire, interview and observation. The authors also use references associating DSR with case studies, for greater contextual rigor of the research.FindingsThis work presents findings and contributions, both new and also reinforcing others already present (1) use of the principles of Citizen/Plain Language improve instructional communication related to process modeling; (2) the citizen process language GERAL itself; (3) the BPMN pra GERAL guide for process translation; (4) qualitative findings from the observation of the use of the artifact in a real case, with non-experts and (5) a well-founded instance of building a notation with an emphasis on understanding, which can be replicated in other cases.Research limitations/implicationsFuture perspectives for conducting the research are presented. As a qualitative research instantiated involving a subjective construct, such as understanding, generalization is partially limited and should be interpreted as a transferability criterion. The evaluation involved participants with complete higher education and graduates, even though from areas not dedicated to process modeling or BPMN, being non-experts. The main indicator was understood with limitations in other aspects, such as formal semantics and precise executability.Practical implicationsThe formative research showed improvements to the base artifact, the framework first version, which will consequently be reflected in the guide. The GERAL and the guide were very well received, and all participants were able to translate the proposed model effectively, despite small slips in second notation. The guide improved the participants' perception of transparency and understanding of business processes, making them aware of the benefits of this topic.Social implicationsThe output of the built and researched artifact are understandable models by non-experts in technical languages of business processes. It is an alternative for BPMN models and dubious/long texts. Almost unexpectedly, the guide and its principles awaken an appreciation of understandable procedural communication, that is, it builds an intrinsic motivation in the user of the importance of publicizing his processes and assists in compliance with current data disclosure laws. It also builds informational democratic values of better participation and data absorption, from translators to the target audience.Originality/valueIt presents a qualitative approach to deal with business process modeling and understanding; substantiates in detail, using well-established bases in the literature, the construction of a solution aimed at understanding business processes; offers a translation guide for non-experts and experts interested in disclosing and instructing their procedural information modeled in BPMN.
Electronic government (e-gov) processes need transparency in order to allow citizens to access, understand and verify valuable information in a democratic society. As a crosscutting characteristic, transparency should be present in different e-gov perspectives, such as business processes, information, business rules and information systems. Thus, in this article, we present a multi-agent system (MAS) to implement transparent lawsuit distribution process. We demonstrate that the MAS paradigm emphasizes the organizational operating environment and the information systems alignment, being adequate to implement process transparency under a Brazilian study-case in lawsuit distribution that used real data from the Superior Labor Court of Brazil. The Tropos agent-oriented software development methodology is used to define the hard and soft goals of agents. The MAS architecture and the prototype were defined and implemented using JADE Framework.
Information security is an essential subject for commercial and government organizations, and its deployment should be supported by software tools, both at design time (when authorization business rules are planned and designed) and at run time (when authorization business rules are applied and monitored). An authorization business rule (or authorization rules, for short) is a rule that states which operations may be executed on each data item by each user. Therefore, information security supporting tools should include features for editing, managing, and assuring the application and monitoring of authorization rules. These features may be structured in a framework composed by rule management and rule execution components. In real scenarios, evaluating and selecting tools to support organization business processes is typically handled by prospecting activities that are conducted in an ad-hoc way, and therefore are very time-consuming and hard to track. However, the rapid evolution of business scenarios, the increasing demand for traceability in business-IT alignment and the great number of IT solutions available for being evaluated require prospecting activities to be more systematic, traceable and quickly adapted to different scenarios. This work proposes a set of criteria and a systematic method for evaluating tools for management and execution of authorization rules. We have applied our approach in a real scenario. The results demonstrated that BRMS (Business Rule Management Systems) tools can be used for authorization rule management, and Oracle DBMS is the most suitable tool for authorization rules storage and execution. ; Segurança da informação é um tópico essencial para organizações privadas e governamentais, e sua disponibilização deve ser apoiada por ferramentas de software, tanto em tempo de projeto (quando regras de negócio de autorização são planejadas e projetadas) como em tempo de execução (quando regras de negócio de autorização são aplicadas e monitoradas). Uma regra de negócio de autorização (ou regra de autorização, de forma resumida) é uma regra que afirma quais operações podem ser executadas em cada item de dado por cada usuário. Portanto, ferramentas para apoiar a segurança da informação devem incluir características como edição, gestão, e garantir a aplicação e monitoramento de regras de autorização. Estas características podem ser estruturadas em um framework composto por compontentes de gestão e execução de regras. Em cenários reais, avaliar e selecionar ferramentas para apoiar processos de negócio da organização é em geral tratado por atividades de prospecção que são conduzidas de uma forma ad-hoc, e portanto consomem muito tempo e são difíceis de serem rastreadas. Entretanto, a evolução rápida de cenários do negócio, a demanda crescente de rastreabilidade para alinhamento do negócio e TI e o grande número de soluções de TI disponíveis para serem avalidas requerem atividades de prospecção mais sistemáticas, rastreabilidade e rápida adaptação a diferentes cenários. Este trabalho propõe um conjunto de critérios e um método sistemático para avaliação de ferramentas para gestão e execução de regras de autorização. Nós aplicamos nossa abordagem em um cenário real. Os resultados demonstraram que ferramentas BRMS (Business Rule Management Systems) podem ser usadas para gestão de regras de autorização, e que o SGBD Oracle, dentre as ferramentas analisadas, é a ferramenta mais adequada para armazenamento e execução de regras de autorização.
Purpose – 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.
Design/methodology/approach – 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.
Findings – 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.
Originality/value – 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.
In: Ecotoxicology and environmental safety: EES ; official journal of the International Society of Ecotoxicology and Environmental safety, Band 144, S. 79-87
PurposeThe 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.Design/methodology/approachThe 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.FindingsThe 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.Originality/valueThe 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.
