Knowledge engineering in business process management

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) has become a commodity nowadays. It has undergone an evolution from the initial business process re-engineering in the 1980s to a well-established management approach, which is extensively discussed in this book (See introduction chapter of Harmon on the Scope and Evolution of Business Process Management). This chapter deals with the increasingly important domain of knowledge-sensitive BPM as a current challenge imposed from semantic web, the cloud, social networks or Web 2.0 not only to provide new technologies for BPM but also trigger a cultural change of people involved. Three aspects of knowledge sensitiveness in BPM are proposed. First, BPM can be seen as a domain itself focusing on BP-frameworks identifying basic concepts such as business model, domain, regulation, or model processing (See introduction chapters by Rosemann and vom Brocke on the Six Core Elements of BPM). Second, BPM needs to be applied using a management method such as the BPMS methodology. Third, BPM needs to be executed within an environment; hence, it is deployed. BPM can be seen as a basic concept for corporate knowledge leading to knowledge-sensitive BPM. Studying the knowledge-sensitiveness two forms of interpretation are distinguished: (1) knowledge engineering (KE) focusing on machine interpretable knowledge and (2) knowledge management (KM) relating to human interpretation of knowledge. In the following, the focus lies upon KE distinguishing three viewpoints: (a) KE is established in BP-frameworks as a realization within the used meta models for those frameworks; (b) knowledgeintensive actions within the BP method which is typically performed by business process (BP) analysts is supported by KE techniques; (c) deployment of BPM.