Events & News
Computer Science Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Thursday, January 31, 2008 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Light refreshments served in the 9th floor atrium at 10:45 AM. |
| Speaker | J. Leon Zhao |
| Title | Eller Professor and Interim Head |
| Affiliation | Dept. of MIS, University of Arizona |
A Predicate-based Analytical Framework for Managing Multi-faceted Business Process Changes
As organizations automate their business processes under the auspices of e-business, maintaining the consistency of large-scale business processes under various changes has become a significant challenge in corporate information management. Although there has been previous research in the literature on management of process changes, most existing research has focused on changes in the control flow perspective of business processes, thus cannot deal, in a unified manner, with process changes in multiple process perspectives such as control flow, data flow, organization, and process constraints.
In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem by designing a Predicate-based analytical framework that can represent multiple process perspectives. As such, it can be used to enable formal analysis of process changes. In particular, we define and classify process constraint anomalies and develop the algorithm for verifying the consistency of process specifications. The usefulness of the framework is demonstrated via a business case in procurement process management.
Biography
Dr. J. Leon Zhao is Eller Professor in MIS and Director of EPIC Lab, University of Arizona and taught previously at HKUST and College of William and Mary, respectively. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, M.S. degree from UC Davis, and B.S. degree from Beijing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization. His research is on information technology and management, with a particular focus on workflow technology and applications in knowledge distribution, e-learning, supply chain management, organizational performance management, and services computing. Leon's research has been supported by NSF, SAP, and other sponsores. He received an IBM Faculty Award in 2005 for his work in business process management and services computing. Leon has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, International Journal of Web and Grid Services, and International Journal of Web Services Research and is on the editorial board of Journal of Database Management. He has co-edited nine special issues in various IS journals. Leon has been a chair or program chair for several conferences including the First China Summer Workshop on Information Management (2007), the IEEE Conference on Services Computing (2006), the 15th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (2005), and the Workshop on E-Business (2003) among others. He has also served on numerous program committees in international conferences. Leon has published about 40 articles in various journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Journal of MIS, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Frontier, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. His work has also appeared in over 70 refereed papers in various conferences including ICDE, VLDB, and HICSS.