Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Receive Birth
Notification
Confirm
Identity
else
Check
GBA Data
else
Sign Birth
Certificate
Update
GBA Data
Send
Notifications
Close
Case
Escalate
Case
(I)
Identity
Issue
Found
no data
Search
GBA Data
Inconsistency
in certificate
else
Send Notifications
(5)
Receive Birth
Notification
(1)
Confirm
Identity
(2)
Search
GBA Data
(3)
Issue Birth
Certificate
(4)
Check
Validity
(7)
Hand
over Docs
(8)
else
(II)
Update required
Update GBA
Data (6)
Case
to be closed
Close
Case (9)
Fig. 1.
Variants of the process of registering a newborn
and a non-normative reference model. Nevertheless, these processes show a cer-
tain degree of variation caused by, for instance, the size of the municipality or
the used information systems, and evolve independently from each other.
Identification of best practices or reducing of the number of process variants
among the municipalities can be seen as driven factors for process harmonisation.
This requires the identification of semantically corresponding activities of differ-
ent process models based on linguistic or structural analysis [19,20,21]. Those
techniques may reveal that the activity
'Sign Birth Certificate'
in model (
I
)cor-
responds to the activity
'Issue Birth Certificate'
in model (
II
). For this paper,
we assume correspondences between activities to be given.
Once we identify correspondences between activities of various pairs of models,
we can define clusters of related models that capture variants of the same process.
The following challenges must be addressed to support process harmonisation
efforts for a particular cluster of process variants.
C1: Given a set of variants, what are their commonalities in terms of shared
behaviour?
This question relates to the challenge of identifying the behaviour
that is invariably agreed on by all variants, i.e., the implemented invariant
behaviour.
C2: Given a set of variants, what is the most general allowed behaviour?
The
challenge when answering this question is to integrate the behaviour defined by
all process variants, such that the most general behaviour becomes visible. This
is required to come to a notion of a configurable model known from [5,6], which
subsumes the complete behaviour defined in single variants.
C3: Given a set of variants, what are their commonalities in terms of shared
forbidden behaviour?
Similar to the first question, also the shared forbidden
behaviour is of interest for managing process variants.
C4: Given a set of variants, which variants are redundant in terms of the
specified behaviour?
The challenge behind this question is to identify variants
for which the specified behaviour is completely subsumed by another process
variant. In that case, the existence of the former variant may be challenged.
Although these questions may be approached on a structural level by in-
vestigating the set of shared activities, more detailed conclusions can only be
drawn once the behavioural perspective is considered. For instance, the activities
