Thursday, June 26, 2008

BPM Managers and Visualisations

Have just read the latest BPMTrends newsletter: "What Do Business Process Managers Manage?"

What is interesting is the derivation of Process Sponsor and Operational Manager roles within an organisation. In particular, the article shows some derivations of finer grained tasks that are performed by such people. Most Visualisation approaches for BPM are restricted to just roles, which is fine. However, I argue that a visualisation is meant for a task, because it is about providing information for decision making. Since a process manager or sponsor has many tasks to perform, each visualisation, I argue, needs to be tuned to help them make decisions for that task.

Treinish published an interesting paper on this issue a while back, but the truth still holds. As we often produce differing text for differing tasks, so too we should modify visualisations to fit a task, not just a role in an organisation. Case in (simple) point; if I was a modeller talking to another modeller, then I would use a BPMN diagram, due to the compact, iconic representation being easy for experts to use. However, if I was a modeller explaining a process system to a naive viewer, I would not use BPMN, I would probably use a full 3D simulation to get my point across. In fact, the later is often done regarding community consultation in Urban Planning applications, CAD drawings just don't cut it when talking to investors and residents about how a site is to be redeveloped.

I believe this holds across the board, for executable and non-executable modelling systems.

Ross

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

TUE BPM Visualisation Study

From BPM Colleagues at Technical University of Eindhoven
==========================================

Study of Visual Layout on Understandability of Process Models

I would like to encourage you to participate in an online experiment which is part of a research project conducted by the Eindhoven University of Technology by Maria, a student of Hajo Reijers.

The objective of the research is to develop some guidelines on how to draw process models in order to improve their visual quality and, therefore, their understandability. The experiment will take you around
20 minutes.

Your participation is anonymous.
We will appreciate very much your collaboration!

The URL of the experiment is http://www.win.tue.nl/mdlarap/.

Thank you for joining!

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Second Life Adventures of Clik and Mofo



This is a teaser for some of the work we are performing at QUT to integrate Second Life with other software. The avatars are controlled by web services, and deliver the lecture themselves.

Ross

YAWL Game Control Work

I've had this paper and demo floating around for a while now, and have just got around to posting it. This is a video of some work a student of mine performed linking a game mod to the YAWL workflow engine developed by QUT.

The grey user interface, spawning of enemies and registration of killings is coordinated by the YAWL workflow tool, developed at QUT, Brisbane, Australia - http://www.yawlfoundation.org/

This shows how easy it is to give a 3D interface to workflow systems, and shows a very simple example of how to control the "Narrative" of a virtual environment by using workflow systems. In the end, a game quest is just a form of goal directed workflow, so I decided to test it out, and the video is the result.

Has been written up as a conference paper at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00012712/

Ross

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

ACE 2008

=== ACE 2008 ===
(http://www.ace-conf.org/ace2008/)

- Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology -

Invites you to submit Full Papers, Short Papers, Posters and Creative
Showcases.


* Deadline for Full and Short Papers: July 15th, 2008
* Deadline for Posters and Creative Showcases: July 15th, 2008

Submissions of papers will be online on our conference website
(http://www.ace-conf.org/ace2008/), and should follow the ACM
Submission Format.

The conference will take place:
December 3rd - 5th, 2008 in Yokohama, Japan.

Entertainment is one of the important magical ingredients in the 21st
Century society. ACE 2008 is an annual international conference
devoted to computer entertainment to provide a premium forum for
researchers, developers, practitioners, artists and designers to
present and discuss new problems, solutions, content design and
technologies in entertainment areas.

We warmly invite original papers, demos, art and design works in all
areas of entertainment computing and design including
(but not limited to):

Affective Computing Internet Networking Media
Ambient Intelligence Learning and Children
Animation Techniques Location-Based Entertainment
Augmented / Mixed Reality Metaverse
Avatars and Virtual Community Mobile Entertainment
Cultural Computing Multimodal Interaction
Digital Entertainment and Sports Narratives / Digital Storytelling
Digital Broadcasting/Podcasting Pervasive and Online Games
Digital Cinema Physical Computing
Elderly Entertainment Smart Gadgets and Toys
Entertainment Design Theory Social Networking
Human-Robots Interaction Sound and Music
Experience Design Synesthetic Entertainment
Funology Tangible Interfaces
Graphics Techniques Visual Effects
Interaction Design

For further information please visit: http://www.ace-conf.org/ace2008/

Masa Inakage and Adrian David Cheok (General Chairs ACE 2008)

Fujitsu Process Mining Tools

Got this link in an email from BPTrends about Fujitsu software for process discovery. The article includes a messy diagram illustrating the links between each event that has occurred in the process system. This diagram is then filtered to produce a final process diagram. Looks like a good piece of software, but I have to again comment that the representations are 2D, and still wonder to myself whether a 3D large graph rendering approach would help the users in choosing filtering options. If the diagram is to be believed, they do not even use colour to highlight patterns! However, I have not used the software, so this may be a feature that has not been highlighted in the article. Might get a demo of the software just to see...

Ross

Sunday, June 1, 2008

A link to my reference list

I have uploaded a document to Google Docs with a textfile reference list of relevant papers I have looked at so far for my research into BPMVE. I hope it proves useful to people, it will be periodically updated as I read and write more papers.

Ross