Risk-Aware BPM

Overview

Project status: In progress

This project will increase risk awareness in corporate process management and, in so doing, will lead to increased process awareness within corporate risk management. It will investigate, evaluate and enhance current approaches for the identification, analysis, evaluation, treatment, and overall management of risk as it relates to business processes.

Informed by relevant mathematical foundations, conceptual-analytical research, and empirical evidence from a range of case studies, the project will extend established process management approaches by explicitly including the concept of risk as an integral part of process definition and enactment.

http://www.yawlfoundation.org/risk

Grantor

ARC Discovery

Amount

$450,000

Research leader
Research team
QUT External collaborators Prof. Wil van der Aalst
Organisational unit
Lead unit Science and Engineering Faculty
Start date
1st January 2011
End date
31st December 2013
Research area
Information Systems
Keywords
risk, bpm, risk aware, business process management

Contact

For more information contact Professor Arthur ter Hofstede.

 

Details

Recent studies have shown that business process management (BPM) continues to be effective in reducing costs and in improving process quality, not to mention its status as an important technology by CEOs.

Nevertheless, numerous high-profile scandals, such as the classic Enron scandal as well as the recent UBS rogue trader and the Olympus accounting scandals have highlighted the fact that business processes are subjected to numerous risks, some of which may be detrimental to the survival of the organisations. In particular, the UBS rogue trader scandal showed how a weakness in ETF trade confirmation process (which allows trade confirmation to happen after trade settlement) was allegedly exploited by the rogue trader as a tool to cover the actual lost he made from other speculative trading. This event happened despite the bank having one of the best risk management units.

These incidents, combined with the increasing pressure on businesses to comply with a significant number of risk-related standards (such as Basel II and SOX), highlight the need to bring closer the discipline of BPM and risk management such that integrated reasoning and management of risks in business processes can be achieved.

Unfortunately, these two disciplines tend to operate independently of each other. While there have been some contributions from the research community in this area, the study of integrating these two disciplines is still in its infancy.

The risk-aware business process management research project is therefore conducted at Queensland University of Technology to increase our knowledge in this area and to provide theoretically-sound and usable tools that can be used by practitioners in managing risks in business processes.

Publications and output

Conforti, R., Fortino, G., Rosa, M. L., and ter Hofstede. A. History-Aware Real-Time Risk Detection in Business Processes. In Meersman, R. et al. eds: Proceedings of the On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2011, Part I, volume 7044 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 100-118, Springer, 2011. Published Version Technical Report