The field of Business Process Management (BPM) is rich with methodologies, techniques and tools to support the analysis, design, automation and management of business processes. However, few of these methods and techniques find their way to direct application by practitioners and, if they do, only after a serious time lag. A couple of issues may be related to this phenomenon. Arguably, researchers spend too little attention on the evaluation of their methods and techniques beyond the small, toy-sized examples that fit the typical scientific publication. Thus, the scalability of the proposed solutions is often not properly determined. In consequence, it may be extremely difficult for a practitioner to select that method or technique from the many available that most effectively contributes to the actual management and improvement of processes of real dimensions.

The goals of this workshop are twofold. First, the aim is to reflect on the applicability of the existing methods and techniques under realistic, industry-strength conditions, and especially, in the context of large process models or collections thereof. While academic BPM research is often single minded, in the sense that it puts the focus on one view on a process, one type of stakeholder, one performance aspect, one type of process model, one abstraction level, one type of modeling notation, etc., reality is often multi-faceted. The workshop solicits contributions that show the limitations of existing methods and techniques and identify how these limitations can be addressed to enable industrial usage.

Second, the aim is to identify issues that have been under-researched because they typically do not occur when considering process management at the micro level or only under highly stylized conditions, e.g. when assuming that processes are small, few in numbers, or structured. Contributions that show the complexities of having to deal with large or unstructured processes, great numbers of process models and processes that involve many participants across various organizations, are therefore highly welcome as well. In this way, the workshop hopes to stimulate calls for new, relevant BPM research.

The workshop aspires to bring together researchers and practitioners who have an interest in life-sized business process management, i.e. the development and application of methodologies, techniques, and tools to support operational business processes with all their complexities. We seek contributions by those who wish to share their criticism on existing methods and techniques while also being able to present innovative ideas on scaling up these approaches, making them more suitable for real-life application, or on finding alternative approaches. Two main categories of submissions/presentations will be considered: a) work in progress, and b) regular papers.


Location and Date

IW-PL'10 will be organised on 13 September 2010 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA in conjunction with BPM 2010


Topics of the workshop include but are not limited to:

* process management in large projects or for large processes/process collections (e.g. frameworks, modeling conventions, guidelines and governance)
* support of many views on, or application scenarios of, process models
* scalability of BPM methods, techniques and tools
* techniques and tools to deal with the management and maintenance of large/complex process models or large numbers thereof, over longer periods of time (e.g. refactoring techniques or repository technology)
* use of collections of process models that relate to each other (e.g. reference models, configurable process models, process families)
* human aspects in distributed process modeling or maintenance
* multi-faceted process analysis or design