Digital Government and Business Process Management (BPM)

Description

Interoperability is a key challenge for organizations to collaborate with each other and be able to provide high-quality services. Digital Government (e-Government) focuses on value delivery to citizens through information and communication technology (ICT) support for processes, activities and resources, from different public organizations. Hence, interoperability in the context of e- Government is of critical importance to link and integrate processes and services sharing data from organizations to deliver better public services to citizens. Many efforts have been carried out in the last decades to support interoperability within e-Government settings, including the definition and introduction of several interoperability frameworks and platforms in countries and continents, such as the European Interoperability Framework. Interoperability is not only provided by technical means, semantic or syntactic interoperability, but also thanks to business-oriented approaches supporting organizational interoperability, such as Business Process Management (BPM).

BPM constitutes a real asset for enhancing the services of an organization and their coordination, as well as the products that each actor of a virtual network delivers to meet clients’ expectations (citizens, patients, etc.). The BPM lifecycle embraces several phases that aim for a continuous process improvement, including process discovery and modeling, process mining and analysis, process re-design, process enactment and monitoring. Collaborative organizations need ways to define and provide support for their inter-organizational collaborative processes, in order to interact with each other in an easier, more secure and more adequate way, ensuring the quality of the results to the internal and the external users. This support must fulfill both centralized and decentralized scenarios depending on the domain and the organizations involved, including the integration of their existing software and information systems for the exchange of data and the execution of business functions.

Digital government’s collaborative processes involve organizations (employees, technologies), partners (providers, consumers), and users (citizens, foreigners), leading to complex interactions within different e-Government models and available technologies. These interactions can take place within two main scenarios: (i) closed, in which interactions between organizations are explicitly defined and already agreed as collaborative business processes; or (ii) open, in which organizations offer capabilities for integration, not explicitly agreeing on their processes but mostly on the capabilities they provide or require to participate in the collaboration (like payment, event awareness, security, process monitoring and analysis, open data, integration with social networks, and prediction). Moreover, the deployment of a BPM approach in a sensitive e-Government context often faces critical barriers, such as change management and a potential discouragement when it comes to modeling complex organizational behaviors.

Successful inter-organizational collaborative process management within e-Government organizations will lead to better conceptual and technological integration, not only with each other but also with citizens and users in general. To this end, it is necessary to devise new ways to deal with the complexity of e-Government collaborative process definition, modeling, mining, analysis, enactment, monitoring and improvement from various dimensions and points of view including theory, engineering, interoperability, agility, social aspects, etc. Several aspects for the definition and treatment of business processes in e-Government settings have to be taken into account, such as process data registration and collection, data integration, data quality and data transparency, interoperability to support the interaction within participant organizations with heterogeneous technologies, software and information systems. Emerging elements pose new challenges when applied and/or providing support for e-Government business processes, such as AI-enabled BPM, blockchain and IoT settings for BPM, Green BPM and process sustainability, and more recently for COVID-19 processes and e-health services.

This mini-track focuses on BPM in the context of Digital Government specific scenarios, with a focus on collaborative processes and interoperability within e-Government organizations. We invite papers that deal with any aspect involved in the identification, design, mining, discovering, analysis, implementation, enactment, integration, interoperability, operation, evaluation, performance and use of BPM principles and existing/emerging BPM approaches for discussing inter-organizational collaborative process models, architectures, platforms, ICT integration and support, as well as case studies, examples and applications of BPM restricted to e-Government scenarios.

Topics of interest include

• Collaborative BPM support for e-Government
• BPM and Enterprise Architectures for e-Government
• BPM and Service engineering for e-Government
• E-Government Interoperability based on BPM and Service Oriented Architecture
• BPM and Model-driven approaches for e-Government
• Business process mining and business intelligence for e-Government
• Business process families and variability in e-Government
• BPM collaborative process in cloud, social and big data contexts for e-Government
• BPM middleware, IoT, blockchain platforms for collaborative processes in e-Government
• Adaptive Case Management and other non-workflow approaches to BPM for e-Government
• AI-enabled BPM for e-Government
• BPM security and privacy in e-Government
• Business process open data and quality in e-Government
• Green BPM and process sustainability in e-Government
• BPM culture, people and citizens involvement in e-Government
• Case studies, examples and applications of BPM to e-Government
• e-Government BPM process support for Covid-19 and e-health services

 

Minitrack Leaders

Hernán Astudillo is Professor of Informatics at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM). He is Informatics Engineer (UTFSM, 1988) and Ph.D. Information and Computer Science (GeorgiaTech, 1995). His main R&D interest is identification, recovery and reuse of architectural decisions and architectural knowledge (especially architectural tactics). He is Principal Investigator of the Toeska R&D Team, which conducts teaching, research and technology transfer in software architecture, semantic software systems and software process improvement, and their application in e-governance and heritage computing. He is also responsible for UTFSM's Software Architecture academic activities; chairs UTFSM's Doctorate in Informatics Engineering; and co-chairs the UTFSM's BPM Center. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in international journals and conferences, supervised tens of graduate theses, organized several national and international conferences and workshops, and lead numerous R&D projects and international collaboration ventures.

Félix García is full professor at the Alarcos research group of the University of Castilla – La Mancha (Spain). He received his MSc (2001) and PhD (2004) degrees in Computer Science from the UCLM. His research interests include business process management, software processes, software measurement, agile methods and software sustainability. He has been main researcher in several R&D and industry projects. As researcher he has participated in 2 international projects, 12 projects from Spanish national calls and 9 regional ones. He has also participated in 2 international research networks and more than 10 national ones. He has co-supervised 9 PhDs and has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles. He has participated in the organization of several international and national conferences and workshops. He holds the following professional certifications: PMP (Project Management Professional). Id. 2942308; CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor), Id. 17140795; Scrum Manager (expert level) Id. 19421, Scrum Master PSM-I.

Andrea Delgado is an Associate Professor of the Computer Science Institute of the School of Engineering at Universidad de la República (UdelaR). She is a Computer Science Engineer UdelaR, 2003), Master in Informatics (PEDECIBA UdelaR, 2007) and Ph.D. in Informatics (PEDECIBA UdelaR, 2012) and Advanced Informatic Tecnologies (UCLM, Spain, 2012). Her main research interests are in business process and technologies, process mining, service oriented computing and model driven development, and their application to different domains such as e-Government, health, banking. She leads the business process research line at the COAL research group, teaching and leading technical transfer in several projects with Uruguayan government organizations and software industry enterprises. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in international journal and conferences, supervised tens of graduate theses and four posgraduate thesis, lead and participated in several research projects national and international, organized and chaired many national and international conferences and workshops, and many collaboration initiatives with Latin American and European research groups.