6th International Workshop on
Business Process Design

In conjunction with
8^th International Conference on Business Process Management
13 September 2010
Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

Conscious (re)design of business processes is a powerful means for the pro-active improvement of process performance as well as for re-active achievement of higher process conformance. Despite being the most value-adding aspect of the process lifecycle, process design is still more art than science. Many methodologies on the subject remain vague about how to actually derive superior process design. The practice of business process design tends to rely on the creativity and previous experience of business professionals to come up with new, improved processes. Because of the variability in creativity levels, experience and tacit knowledge, the outcomes of such efforts are inconsistent and can thus undermine the potential benefits of Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives in organizations.

The existing more scientific approaches have focused often on only small, well-understood business domains and are either centered around atomic improvement proposals or general reference models. Overall, much more attention is devoted to process modeling techniques and standards than actual value-adding process design. In a way, this is similar to agreeing on the language, without knowing what to say. The aim of this workshop is to continue the ongoing and successful discussions of the last five BPD workshops to further nurture a body of knowledge on the disciplined, well-understood and appropriately evaluated design of business processes. We have witnessed in the previous BPD workshops that besides research on BPD methodologies, there is a trend and a focus on addressing constraints in process design, user involvement, process reference models and process design quality.  Papers that introduce innovative tools for process design, as well as papers that address soft issues (human aspects) and quantitative aspects (e.g. financial evaluation of proposed process improvements), will be particularly welcome.

We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners who have an interest in advancing the state of the art in process design (in contrast to process modeling or execution). We seek contributions by authors who wish to share their innovative ideas and insightful observations on the subject. Two main categories of submissions will be considered: regular papers and industry papers. All submissions have to follow the procedure explained under  Submissions. For topics of interest to the workshop please refer to Topics.