stewart green - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by stewart green
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
The presence of business process models in cancer care organisations is a must for the purpose of... more The presence of business process models in cancer care organisations is a must for the purpose of documenting the workflow of the business and for the sake of required continuous improvement. Goal-oriented models show the dependency relations between business goals and their elaboration into finer unambiguous goals that are achievable through business tasks and measured using metrics. Also, business goals represent the rationales behind a business process. Therefore, goal-oriented models are required to represent a strategic angle of the current business processes at cancer care organisations in order to help the stakeholders in improving their decision making and the continuous improvement regarding goals. This paper presents a re-engineering method for deriving goal-oriented models that are enriched with quality-oriented models from a role-oriented business process model. The work is evaluated using a case study from a cancer care institute in Jordan. The results of this research contribute to bridging the gap between a cancer care business and its systems from the strategic perspective. Moreover, the work contributes in enriching the cancer care stakeholders’ knowledge regarding the business drivers of their operations. Further work is planned that aims at linking the resulting goal-oriented models with the cancer care organisation’s internal procedure, policies and protocols and vice versa in order to have the full traceability chain from goals and protocols to business process models.
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
Contemporary Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) design methods lack the knowledge of busin... more Contemporary Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) design methods lack the knowledge of business process in an enterprise. The object-based business process architecture (BPA) design methods generate useful information of business entities and process that can assist in deriving a business process-aware EIA in a semi-automatic manner. This paper reports on the impact of applying the BPAOntoEIA framework to a Cancer Care & Registration actual case study in order to derive a semantic EIA from its associated Riva-based BPA semantic model. The benefit of this framework manifests itself in the knowledge of business processes, their orchestration and models of the cancer care organisation while inter-connecting the business processes with information categories, and thus enhancing the business-IT alignment of the given cancer care & Registration process architecture. An automation of 80% of the semantic EIA derivation is reported and EIA quality metrics were developed that have informed the evaluation of the automated derivation of a corresponding Cancer Care and Registration EIA.
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
The Riva method identifies an organisation’s business process architecture. Unfortunately, the re... more The Riva method identifies an organisation’s business process architecture. Unfortunately, the research literature does not contain evidence that the heuristics used in the method’s key steps have been validated. To begin to address this shortcoming, the co-researchers have applied Riva to aspects of the cancer care domain at the King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC) in Amman, Jordan. A subset of the results was presented to KHCC domain experts, who were invited to evaluate the validity and completeness of the heuristics used in each of the method’s steps. Their evaluation indicates that the large majority of the heuristics associated to the various steps of the method was seen as valid; with the exception that there was a perceived lack of specific guidance by means of heuristics related to Case Strategy Processes.
International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, 2013
Enterprises are increasingly organising their activities and IT support around key business proce... more Enterprises are increasingly organising their activities and IT support around key business processes. These processes and their interrelationships may be identified in a process architecture. Ould (2005) claims that the Riva method identifies the process architecture that an organisation should have, and asserts that organisations in the same business have the same process architecture. This assertion is not self-evidently true, and it has not been corroborated by the literature. But it is an important claim: if true, then process architectures could be reused either for new process development, or for appraising an organisation's existing architecture. We assessed the assertion by comparing the process architectures produced by applying Riva to two higher education institutions. The results partially support the view that an essential process architecture underpins higher education institutions, and also that for regulated business domains the optimal process architecture may be one based upon designed as well as essential business entities. The conclusion is that process architecture reuse, with its attendant potential savings of time and money, is worth investigating further, even though the extent to which the invariant assertion is testable may not be clear yet.
International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2009
We apply a particular process architecture development method, Riva, to a study and comparison of... more We apply a particular process architecture development method, Riva, to a study and comparison of specimen processes in two UK higher education institutions. We developed an outline process architecture for one common area of activity (development and delivery of taught programmes), then drew role activity diagrams for two selected processes at both institutions, in order to compare them. We found considerable variation at the concrete level even in these similar organisations, but saw more commonality when we developed abstract models using only core elements. Though even the abstract models were not identical, there was enough similarity to suggest some potential for reuse of process designs between organisations. Such designs may usefully serve as examples, to be copied, modified or extended as locally appropriate. It might be useful to build repositories of process models and architectures, for use by organisations in the same business sector.
It is becoming increasingly accepted that the development of computer-based systems to sup-port b... more It is becoming increasingly accepted that the development of computer-based systems to sup-port business processes should start with an understanding of business processes and business goals [EP00]. Unfortunately knowledge of those processes and goals is not always readily avail-able. For example, written information is often non-existent or unreliable. So such knowledge needs
International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2004
This report presents a brief review of work on the development of knowledge based tools for requi... more This report presents a brief review of work on the development of knowledge based tools for requirements capture. A number of different approaches are considered, and an attempt is made to draw these together into a common framework. On the basis of this review, a number of suggestions are made regarding the possibility of providing knowledge based support for a generic approach to requirements capture such as GMARC. 4 1 Introduction Requirements engineering is a knowledge intensive activity: according to Curtis [Cur87], `knowledge application is the key to effective software development'. The incorporation of facilities to provide intelligent or knowledge-based support into the current generation of computer-based tools for requirements capture is therefore likely to lead to enormous benefits in terms of productivity gains. A number of different kinds of knowledge and a number of different AI techniques are likely to be of use. This report presents a brief review of techniques...
ion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4.2.4 Structuring . . . ... more ion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4.2.4 Structuring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.2.5 Comprehensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.3 Choice of a formal notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 5 Requirements of the approach 24 5.1 Domain models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 5.1.1 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 5.1.2 User interface for creating and maintaining domain models . . . . . . 24 5.1.3 Domain model creation and maintenance operations . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2 Requirements models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2.1 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2.2 User interface for creating and maintaining requirements models . . . 25 5.2.3 Requirements model creation a...
This paper aims to rectify this situation by first explaining what good requirements engineering ... more This paper aims to rectify this situation by first explaining what good requirements engineering involves and why it is necessary, and then by introducing to the reader a wide variety of approaches that have been taken to capturing application requirements.
In a recent paper (Beeson et al., 2002), we discussed the question of how connections were made b... more In a recent paper (Beeson et al., 2002), we discussed the question of how connections were made between corporate strategy formulation and the provision of working information systems in organizations. We concluded that these connections were substantially made through an ongoing pattern of interactions, including regular meetings, which occurred in
Extracting business process models from stakeholders in large organizations is a very difficult, ... more Extracting business process models from stakeholders in large organizations is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Many obstacles such as tacit knowledge, inaccurate descriptions of processes and miscommunication prevent process engineers from ascertaining what the business processes actually are. Data sources that represent the communications can be a good candidate for facilitating the identification of the business processes. The proposed approach in this research is to find business process related emails, identify email message threads, and finally, tag them using conversation for action theory. The outcome of this method will be process fragment enactment models that can help process engineers both to validate their findings about the business processes, and also to understand better the vague and unclear parts of the processes.
Riva is a method for identifying two kinds of organisation process architecture: one based on ess... more Riva is a method for identifying two kinds of organisation process architecture: one based on essential business entities, the other on both essential business entities and designed business entities. Riva’s designer claims that organisations in the same business will have the same essential process architecture [5]. This implies that for another organisation of the same type an existing essential architecture can serve either as a starting point for designing its processes, or to assess both the completeness of its current processes and the appropriateness of the interrelationships between them. To assess these implications, the authors applied Riva to two higher education organisations in order to create both kinds of process architecture for higher education organisations. The process architectures were reviewed to assess their potential for reuse. The result was that process architectures derived from essential business entities seemed to have the greatest potential for reuse. T...
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
Cancer Care is considered as a System of Systems (SoS) which results from the collaboration of a ... more Cancer Care is considered as a System of Systems (SoS) which results from the collaboration of a set of independent socio and technical constituent systems, largely driven by stakeholders’ needs and goals at multiple levels in a cancer care organisation taking into consideration SoS high-level goals and the constituent systems-level individual goals. It’s challenging to manage these goals specially in such complex large-scale SoS arrangement. However, Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is considered a promising approach in SoS context to adopt in order to identify, model and manage goals achieved by the overall SoS and its constituent systems. This paper is aimed at investigating the implications of using GORE approaches, and in particular the i* framework to model Cancer Care goals in SoS context. We propose a new process to extract i* elements and concepts from existing user documentation, a "Goals Referential Integrity (GRI)" model that is aimed at maintainin...
The Computer Science and Creative Technologies Department at the University of the West of Englan... more The Computer Science and Creative Technologies Department at the University of the West of England has a history of running group social events for multiple awards during induction week. The main aim of these fun events is to help new students to make friends and thus to settle into their courses quickly. Last year we added a new aim: to relate event activities to aspects of the students’ courses. Consequently, new activities involved teams of five competing for book tokens on tasks involving communication skills, problem analysis and problem solving skills, abstract modelling skills and practical modelling skills. In addition, during a 30 minute interval in the three hour event, three ten-minute speed-networking sessions enable students to meet and chat to more new peers. Feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive. One said: “I enjoyed this event a lot. This is actually where I made some of my closest friends”; and another told us: “I found the speed networking extremel...
In this paper we explore the possibility of using a language action perspective to extend an anal... more In this paper we explore the possibility of using a language action perspective to extend an analysis of organizational processes based on role activity diagramming (RAD). We have previously used role activity diagramming to show the large scale communication flows in an organizational domain and wanted to apply a language action approach to arrive at a finer level of detail for particular interaction sequences. An analytical and modelling approach derived from Winograd & Flores’s ideas about ‘conversations for action’ (CfA) is used to reveal and consider some of the inner dynamics of interaction. The CfA approach could be beneficially re-founded on a Habermasian base to bring out better the participative nature of interaction. This kind of modelling will be a useful supplement to RAD modelling and could perhaps form part of a more generalized exchange model for organizational processes.
To fulfill the objectives of a software development project in an organisation, project participa... more To fulfill the objectives of a software development project in an organisation, project participants create different kinds of dependencies on each other. These dependencies and their types reveal a lot of dependency information about processes that are being followed to complete a project: e.g. project team structure, culture and communication patterns. Extracting these dependencies, which represent fragments of business process execution, and helping the analysts to find the root causes of some of the organizational problems in the projects is a non-trivial task; and business analysts and consultants might need to spend a lot of time doing this, using conventional analysis methods. Using a new concept called dependency cycles, this paper introduces a method for extracting these dependencies from conversation logs, and shows how they can be analyzed in order to extract patterns that could help an organization to improve its structure, communication forms, culture and business proce...
We have used the business process modelling method ‘Riva’ to model processes of programme managem... more We have used the business process modelling method ‘Riva’ to model processes of programme management in two UK universities. The method depends on the identification of ‘essential business entities’ as the basis for defining a process architecture. The author of the method claims that organisations in the same business will have the same process architecture. In two attempts to produce process architectures for our case organisations, we could not produce any convergence in the outcomes. The exercise was however useful, as is the method. We make some suggestions regarding a core architecture for the area of activity under study, and make some observations on the method and the concepts used in it.
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
The presence of business process models in cancer care organisations is a must for the purpose of... more The presence of business process models in cancer care organisations is a must for the purpose of documenting the workflow of the business and for the sake of required continuous improvement. Goal-oriented models show the dependency relations between business goals and their elaboration into finer unambiguous goals that are achievable through business tasks and measured using metrics. Also, business goals represent the rationales behind a business process. Therefore, goal-oriented models are required to represent a strategic angle of the current business processes at cancer care organisations in order to help the stakeholders in improving their decision making and the continuous improvement regarding goals. This paper presents a re-engineering method for deriving goal-oriented models that are enriched with quality-oriented models from a role-oriented business process model. The work is evaluated using a case study from a cancer care institute in Jordan. The results of this research contribute to bridging the gap between a cancer care business and its systems from the strategic perspective. Moreover, the work contributes in enriching the cancer care stakeholders’ knowledge regarding the business drivers of their operations. Further work is planned that aims at linking the resulting goal-oriented models with the cancer care organisation’s internal procedure, policies and protocols and vice versa in order to have the full traceability chain from goals and protocols to business process models.
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
Contemporary Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) design methods lack the knowledge of busin... more Contemporary Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) design methods lack the knowledge of business process in an enterprise. The object-based business process architecture (BPA) design methods generate useful information of business entities and process that can assist in deriving a business process-aware EIA in a semi-automatic manner. This paper reports on the impact of applying the BPAOntoEIA framework to a Cancer Care & Registration actual case study in order to derive a semantic EIA from its associated Riva-based BPA semantic model. The benefit of this framework manifests itself in the knowledge of business processes, their orchestration and models of the cancer care organisation while inter-connecting the business processes with information categories, and thus enhancing the business-IT alignment of the given cancer care & Registration process architecture. An automation of 80% of the semantic EIA derivation is reported and EIA quality metrics were developed that have informed the evaluation of the automated derivation of a corresponding Cancer Care and Registration EIA.
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
The Riva method identifies an organisation’s business process architecture. Unfortunately, the re... more The Riva method identifies an organisation’s business process architecture. Unfortunately, the research literature does not contain evidence that the heuristics used in the method’s key steps have been validated. To begin to address this shortcoming, the co-researchers have applied Riva to aspects of the cancer care domain at the King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC) in Amman, Jordan. A subset of the results was presented to KHCC domain experts, who were invited to evaluate the validity and completeness of the heuristics used in each of the method’s steps. Their evaluation indicates that the large majority of the heuristics associated to the various steps of the method was seen as valid; with the exception that there was a perceived lack of specific guidance by means of heuristics related to Case Strategy Processes.
International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, 2013
Enterprises are increasingly organising their activities and IT support around key business proce... more Enterprises are increasingly organising their activities and IT support around key business processes. These processes and their interrelationships may be identified in a process architecture. Ould (2005) claims that the Riva method identifies the process architecture that an organisation should have, and asserts that organisations in the same business have the same process architecture. This assertion is not self-evidently true, and it has not been corroborated by the literature. But it is an important claim: if true, then process architectures could be reused either for new process development, or for appraising an organisation's existing architecture. We assessed the assertion by comparing the process architectures produced by applying Riva to two higher education institutions. The results partially support the view that an essential process architecture underpins higher education institutions, and also that for regulated business domains the optimal process architecture may be one based upon designed as well as essential business entities. The conclusion is that process architecture reuse, with its attendant potential savings of time and money, is worth investigating further, even though the extent to which the invariant assertion is testable may not be clear yet.
International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2009
We apply a particular process architecture development method, Riva, to a study and comparison of... more We apply a particular process architecture development method, Riva, to a study and comparison of specimen processes in two UK higher education institutions. We developed an outline process architecture for one common area of activity (development and delivery of taught programmes), then drew role activity diagrams for two selected processes at both institutions, in order to compare them. We found considerable variation at the concrete level even in these similar organisations, but saw more commonality when we developed abstract models using only core elements. Though even the abstract models were not identical, there was enough similarity to suggest some potential for reuse of process designs between organisations. Such designs may usefully serve as examples, to be copied, modified or extended as locally appropriate. It might be useful to build repositories of process models and architectures, for use by organisations in the same business sector.
It is becoming increasingly accepted that the development of computer-based systems to sup-port b... more It is becoming increasingly accepted that the development of computer-based systems to sup-port business processes should start with an understanding of business processes and business goals [EP00]. Unfortunately knowledge of those processes and goals is not always readily avail-able. For example, written information is often non-existent or unreliable. So such knowledge needs
International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2004
This report presents a brief review of work on the development of knowledge based tools for requi... more This report presents a brief review of work on the development of knowledge based tools for requirements capture. A number of different approaches are considered, and an attempt is made to draw these together into a common framework. On the basis of this review, a number of suggestions are made regarding the possibility of providing knowledge based support for a generic approach to requirements capture such as GMARC. 4 1 Introduction Requirements engineering is a knowledge intensive activity: according to Curtis [Cur87], `knowledge application is the key to effective software development'. The incorporation of facilities to provide intelligent or knowledge-based support into the current generation of computer-based tools for requirements capture is therefore likely to lead to enormous benefits in terms of productivity gains. A number of different kinds of knowledge and a number of different AI techniques are likely to be of use. This report presents a brief review of techniques...
ion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4.2.4 Structuring . . . ... more ion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4.2.4 Structuring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.2.5 Comprehensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.3 Choice of a formal notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 5 Requirements of the approach 24 5.1 Domain models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 5.1.1 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 5.1.2 User interface for creating and maintaining domain models . . . . . . 24 5.1.3 Domain model creation and maintenance operations . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2 Requirements models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2.1 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2.2 User interface for creating and maintaining requirements models . . . 25 5.2.3 Requirements model creation a...
This paper aims to rectify this situation by first explaining what good requirements engineering ... more This paper aims to rectify this situation by first explaining what good requirements engineering involves and why it is necessary, and then by introducing to the reader a wide variety of approaches that have been taken to capturing application requirements.
In a recent paper (Beeson et al., 2002), we discussed the question of how connections were made b... more In a recent paper (Beeson et al., 2002), we discussed the question of how connections were made between corporate strategy formulation and the provision of working information systems in organizations. We concluded that these connections were substantially made through an ongoing pattern of interactions, including regular meetings, which occurred in
Extracting business process models from stakeholders in large organizations is a very difficult, ... more Extracting business process models from stakeholders in large organizations is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Many obstacles such as tacit knowledge, inaccurate descriptions of processes and miscommunication prevent process engineers from ascertaining what the business processes actually are. Data sources that represent the communications can be a good candidate for facilitating the identification of the business processes. The proposed approach in this research is to find business process related emails, identify email message threads, and finally, tag them using conversation for action theory. The outcome of this method will be process fragment enactment models that can help process engineers both to validate their findings about the business processes, and also to understand better the vague and unclear parts of the processes.
Riva is a method for identifying two kinds of organisation process architecture: one based on ess... more Riva is a method for identifying two kinds of organisation process architecture: one based on essential business entities, the other on both essential business entities and designed business entities. Riva’s designer claims that organisations in the same business will have the same essential process architecture [5]. This implies that for another organisation of the same type an existing essential architecture can serve either as a starting point for designing its processes, or to assess both the completeness of its current processes and the appropriateness of the interrelationships between them. To assess these implications, the authors applied Riva to two higher education organisations in order to create both kinds of process architecture for higher education organisations. The process architectures were reviewed to assess their potential for reuse. The result was that process architectures derived from essential business entities seemed to have the greatest potential for reuse. T...
2018 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics (CCI), 2018
Cancer Care is considered as a System of Systems (SoS) which results from the collaboration of a ... more Cancer Care is considered as a System of Systems (SoS) which results from the collaboration of a set of independent socio and technical constituent systems, largely driven by stakeholders’ needs and goals at multiple levels in a cancer care organisation taking into consideration SoS high-level goals and the constituent systems-level individual goals. It’s challenging to manage these goals specially in such complex large-scale SoS arrangement. However, Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is considered a promising approach in SoS context to adopt in order to identify, model and manage goals achieved by the overall SoS and its constituent systems. This paper is aimed at investigating the implications of using GORE approaches, and in particular the i* framework to model Cancer Care goals in SoS context. We propose a new process to extract i* elements and concepts from existing user documentation, a "Goals Referential Integrity (GRI)" model that is aimed at maintainin...
The Computer Science and Creative Technologies Department at the University of the West of Englan... more The Computer Science and Creative Technologies Department at the University of the West of England has a history of running group social events for multiple awards during induction week. The main aim of these fun events is to help new students to make friends and thus to settle into their courses quickly. Last year we added a new aim: to relate event activities to aspects of the students’ courses. Consequently, new activities involved teams of five competing for book tokens on tasks involving communication skills, problem analysis and problem solving skills, abstract modelling skills and practical modelling skills. In addition, during a 30 minute interval in the three hour event, three ten-minute speed-networking sessions enable students to meet and chat to more new peers. Feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive. One said: “I enjoyed this event a lot. This is actually where I made some of my closest friends”; and another told us: “I found the speed networking extremel...
In this paper we explore the possibility of using a language action perspective to extend an anal... more In this paper we explore the possibility of using a language action perspective to extend an analysis of organizational processes based on role activity diagramming (RAD). We have previously used role activity diagramming to show the large scale communication flows in an organizational domain and wanted to apply a language action approach to arrive at a finer level of detail for particular interaction sequences. An analytical and modelling approach derived from Winograd & Flores’s ideas about ‘conversations for action’ (CfA) is used to reveal and consider some of the inner dynamics of interaction. The CfA approach could be beneficially re-founded on a Habermasian base to bring out better the participative nature of interaction. This kind of modelling will be a useful supplement to RAD modelling and could perhaps form part of a more generalized exchange model for organizational processes.
To fulfill the objectives of a software development project in an organisation, project participa... more To fulfill the objectives of a software development project in an organisation, project participants create different kinds of dependencies on each other. These dependencies and their types reveal a lot of dependency information about processes that are being followed to complete a project: e.g. project team structure, culture and communication patterns. Extracting these dependencies, which represent fragments of business process execution, and helping the analysts to find the root causes of some of the organizational problems in the projects is a non-trivial task; and business analysts and consultants might need to spend a lot of time doing this, using conventional analysis methods. Using a new concept called dependency cycles, this paper introduces a method for extracting these dependencies from conversation logs, and shows how they can be analyzed in order to extract patterns that could help an organization to improve its structure, communication forms, culture and business proce...
We have used the business process modelling method ‘Riva’ to model processes of programme managem... more We have used the business process modelling method ‘Riva’ to model processes of programme management in two UK universities. The method depends on the identification of ‘essential business entities’ as the basis for defining a process architecture. The author of the method claims that organisations in the same business will have the same process architecture. In two attempts to produce process architectures for our case organisations, we could not produce any convergence in the outcomes. The exercise was however useful, as is the method. We make some suggestions regarding a core architecture for the area of activity under study, and make some observations on the method and the concepts used in it.