REBPS'03: Motivation, Objectives and Overview. Message from the Workshop Organizers

It is well known that it is difficult (if ever possible) to introduce business process management without having a computer system to support business processes. Requirements engineering (RE) for business process support (BPS) systems somewhat differs from RE for traditional business (information) systems in, at least, two aspects. First, a traditional data-model (conceptual model) does not give enough information for building a system, a detailed process model should be built in addition. Second, a traditional business information system is, normally, designed to support a business as is (but more effectively), while a BPS system should be designed to support a new way of running the business, the one which is not possible without the system. The latter leads to substantial requirement changes even long after the system has been deployed. This workshop is meant as a forum for discussing the problem of RE for BPS. The workshop is designed as a meeting place for both researchers and practitioners in the fields of business development, and business application software development. Business process orientation is considered to be an efficient way of increasing productivity and effectiveness of companies and organizations. This is a long process that starts with process identification and mapping and goes on through analysis and reengineering to introduction of process management and process-oriented organization. Business process management, which is constant improvement of business processes, is often considered to be the most important part of process-orientation. However, the process management is impossible to (effectively) introduce, without, first, introducing means for processes control to ensure that each process instance, as a rule, is run according to the process definition. Without process control, the whole idea of process management would not work. If we cannot ensure that the process is run according to a (maybe non-optimal) definition, what is the point to optimize it? For many business processes, especially for those that run across the departmental boundaries and include many human participants, the only way of establishing business process control is via the introduction of a business process support (BPS) system. Such a system should help the human participants to run their processes thus encouraging them to follow a process definition by providing assistance (not by pure force). Simultaneously, the system can gather all essential information about each instance of the process, e.g., when and how started, when and how finished, all activities performed, etc., which is invaluable for process management.