Business Process Management

This book introduces students to business process management, an approach that aims to align the organization's business processes with the demands of the marketplace. Processes serve as a coordination mechanism, and the aim of business process management is to improve the organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in adapting to change, and maintaining competitive advantage. In Business Process Management, Kumar argues for the value of looking at businesses as a collection of processes that cut across departments, and for breaking down functional silos. The book provides an overview of the basic concepts in this field before moving on to more advanced topics such as process verification, flexible processes, process security and evaluation, resource assignment, and social networks. One chapter of the book is also devoted to process analytics. The book concludes with an examination of the future directions of the discipline. Blending a strong grounding in current research with a focus on concepts and tools, Business Process Management is an accessible textbook full of practical examples and cases that will appeal to upper level students.

1. Evolution of Process Thinking 2. How to Model a Process? 3. Data and Resource Modeling 4. Data-Centric Business Process Modeling 5. Modeling for Variation and Flexibility: Dealing with Change 6. Verification of Business Processes 7. Process Evaluation 8. Business Process Security 9. Real-Time and Temporal Processes 10. Social BPM 11. Process Analytics 12. Future Directions

Akhil Kumar is Professor of Information Systems at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He has over 25 years of experience teaching a variety of information systems courses to undergraduate and graduate students. He was a co-program chair for the International Business Process Management conference in 2017.