Sponsor of Best Paper and Best Student Paper Award: IBM

 

The annual BPM conference is the premium forum for researchers, practitioners and developers in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). The objective is to explore and exchange knowledge in this field through scientific talks, industry discussions, technical tutorials and panels. The conference covers all aspects of BPM research and practice, including theory, management, applications and technology, and brings together the most renowned representatives of the BPM community worldwide from academia and industry.

-BPM -is a scientific field and as an industry practice that has significantly matured and increased its span in the last decade Fostering true innovation rather than only incremental change, capitalizing on big data opportunities and accounting for processes that are increasingly flexible and generative rather than structured and stable, are some of the challenges that BPM is facing in order to establish its firm position within organizations.

These challenges add to existing areas of interest and relevance to BPM research and industry. They also attest to an increasingly interdisciplinary nature of BPM, which transcends its original scope at the intersection of information technology, organizational management and industrial engineering, to embrace other disciplines such as behavioral science, big data, operations management, social computing, cloud computing, theory of processes and many more.

BPM 2017 will take place in Barcelona, a cultural and shopping metropolis near the sea that  offers a wide variety of attractions. Apart from the  world famous buildings from Gaudíe.g.,  Sagrada Familia, Pedrera and Parc Güell, Barcelona offers unique museums from world-class artists like Picasso, Miró and Tàpies. BPM 2017 will feature a rich program including a dedicated research track, an industry track, a forum track, a demonstration track, tutorials and panels, and a varied set of workshops and co-located events.

BPM 2017 explicitly encourages papers that report on interdisciplinary aspects of BPM and on research in emerging BPM areas, as well as papers that advance knowledge in the areas of business process analysis and improvement. The thematic areas reflect these interests besides those in traditional BPM topics such as process modeling and execution. Submissions from industry or industrial research labs are encouraged, provided they fulfil the scientific rigor expected from any other paper submitted to the research track.

A separate industry track will host papers that specifically report on problems and experiences related to the deployment of BPM methods and tools in practice. These papers will be reviewed by a separate committee including representatives from industry, and assessed on the basis of their practical relevance rather than their scientific merit. More information can be found on the industry track page.

The thematic areas of the research track in which contributions are sought include, but are not limited to, those listed below. Submissions may fit more than one category, however, corresponding authors will be asked to nominate one primary category. Each major topic is championed by senior PC members who will promote the topic and lead the review processes taking into consideration the characteristics of the particular thematic area.

BPM in a broader context

  • Decision management (e.g. DMN)
  • Events handling
  • Enterprise architecture
  • Auditing
  • Automated planning
  • Scientific workflows
  • Software process management
  • X-aware BPM (e.g. risk-aware, security-aware, cost-aware, green-aware)
  • Operations research for business processes
  • Selected application domains (e.g. healthcare, financial, government)
  • Role of BPM in related fields (e.g. logistics, supply-chain management, manufacturing, complex event processing)

 Emerging areas of BPM

  • Social BPM
  • Cloud computing
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Collaborative business process management
  • Human-centric processes and knowledge-intensive processes
  • Processes in the Internet of Things and Wearable devices
  • Mobile processes
  • Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems

Management aspects of BPM

  • Lifecycle management
  • Strategic alignment and governance
  • People and culture
  • Maturity: success factors and measures
  • Customer process management
  • Adoption and practice
  • Process change management
  • Other organizational management disciplines (e.g. project management, risk management, IT governance)

Process identification and modeling foundations

  • Process architectures and value chains
  • Reference process models
  • Process modeling approaches and languages (imperative, declarative, non-visual, holistic)
  • Process model quality (verification, validation, certification)
  • Foundations of process design
  • Formal methods
  • Management of process model collections (e.g. querying, refactoring, similarity search, versioning)
  • Process variability and configuration
  • Artefact-centric processes
  • Processes and Uncertainty
  • Vertical or horizontal process Integration

Process analysis and improvement

  • Qualitative and quantitative process analysis (e.g. process simulation)
  • Incremental process improvement
  • Transformational process change
  • Process innovation
  • Customer-centric process redesign
  • Other process improvement disciplines (e.g. Lean management, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management)

Process execution, monitoring and intelligence

  • Process execution architectures
  • BPM and WFM systems
  • Case management
  • Adaptive and context-aware process execution
  • Management of process execution aspects (e.g. resources, data)
  • Process dashboards, analytics and visualization of big process data
  • Process mining methods (automated discovery, conformance checking, performance mining, deviance and variants mining, operational support)
  • Process mining (from multi-perspectives) and parallel processing
  • Process compliance (run-time and post-mortem)
  • Process data integration and data quality

 

Submission Instructions

Papers should be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS formatting guidelines (for instructions and style sheets see here). Submissions must be in English and not exceed 16 pages of length. The title page must contain a short abstract clarifying the relation of the paper with the topics above. The paper must clearly state the problem being addressed, the goal of the work, the results achieved, and the relation to other work. Student papers are treated as regular papers in the review process. Importantly, the contribution underlying a student paper must be carried out mainly by the student(s), but others (advisors, collaborators, etc.) can appear as authors as well. When submitting the paper, student papers must be clearly marked as such in the Easychair system. Concerning length and formatting, student papers must follow the same guidelines as research papers. For being eligible as best student paper, student papers have to be presented in the conference by one of the students that authors the paper.

Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format via the BPM 2017 EasyChair submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bpm2017.

Authors are encouraged to adhere to the best practices of Reproducible Research (RR), by making available data and software tools for reproducing the results reported in their papers. Whenever possible, authors may make software and data accessible to reviewers and to the program committee who will verify the accessibility of software and data. Ideally, links to data and code will be then be inserted in the final version of accepted RR papers. For the sake of persistence and proper authorship attribution, authors can use standard repository hosting services such as Dataverse, 4TU, etc. for data sets, and Bitbucket, GitHub, etc. for source code. We ask that when this is not possible the authors should kindly provide a statement explaining the reasons for it.

Submissions must be original contributions that have not been published previously, nor been submitted to other conferences or journals while being submitted to BPM 2017. Empirical papers should build, where possible, on novel datasets previously unpublished. Research on existing datasets must clearly explain the novelty of the applied analysis.

All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. For each accepted paper, at least one author must register for the conference and present the paper. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit a paper for a special issue of Information Systems (Elsevier).

A sub-track, called the “BPM Forum”, will host innovative research which has high potential of stimulating discussion at the conference but does not fully meet the quality criteria for the main research track, e.g. an interesting new idea with a weak evaluation. Those submissions to the main research track which fall into this category will be invited to the BPM Forum and published in full (i.e. 16 pages) in a separate post-proceedings volume in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series, as well as being presented during the main conference. There will not be short papers at the conference.

First-time submitters to BPM may request to be considered for a pre-submission shepherding program in which a selected BPM PC member advises on the presentation and positioning of a sheperded paper. Interested candidates are encouraged to contact the PC Chairs (bpm2017@easychair.org) by 23 January, 2017.

PC Chairs: Josep Carmona, Gregor Engels and Akhil Kumar.

 

Key Dates

Abstract submission: 6 March, 2017 13 March, 2017
Full papers submission: 13 March, 2017 20 March, 2017
Notifications: 15 May, 2017
Camera ready papers: 12 June, 2017
Remark: deadlines correspond to anywhere on earth (“AoE” or “UTC-12”)