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Proceedings This volume contains the original articles presented at the 1 st International Workshop on Empirical Research in Process-Oriented Information Systems – ER-POIS’10. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 22 nd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, in Hammamet, Tunisia, June 8, 2010. Copyright © 2010 for the individual papers by the papers ’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073. I Preface Since the advent of business process reengineering in the 1990s, modeling and optimization of business processes has become a critical factor in business as well as in non-profit and government organizations. Today, with many forms of interorganizational cooperation in the form of e-business, outsourcing, and other

Abstract. The rise of interest in declarative languages for process modeling both justifies and demands empirical investigations into their presumed advantages over more traditional, imperative alternatives. Our concern in this paper is with the ease of maintaining business process models, for example due to changing performance or conformance demands. We aim to contribute to a rigorous, theoretical discussion of this topic by drawing a link to well-established research on maintainability of information artifacts.

Abstract. While process modeling has become important for documenting business operations and automating workflow execution, there are serious issues with efficiently and effectively creating and modifying process models. While prior research has mainly investigated process model comprehension, there is hardly any work on maintainability of process models. Cognitive research into software program comprehension has demonstrated that imperative programs are strong in conveying sequential information while obfuscating circumstantial information. This paper addresses the question whether these findings can be transferred to process model maintenance. In particular, it investigates whether it is easier to incorporate sequential change requirements in imperative process models compared to circumstantial change requirements. To address this question this paper presents results from a controlled experiment providing evidence that the type of change (sequential versus circumstantial) has an effect on the accuracy of process models. For performance indicators modeling speed, correctness, and cognitive load no statistically significant differences could be identified. 1

Abstract. There is a wide variety of drivers for business process modelling initiatives, reaching from business evolution and process optimisation over compliance checking and process certification to process enactment. That, in turn, results in models that differ in content due to serving different purposes. In particular, processes are modelled on different abstraction levels and assume different perspectives. Vertical alignment of process models aims at handling these deviations. While the advantages of such an alignment for inter-model analysis and change propagation are out of question, a number of challenges has still to be addressed. In this paper, we discuss three main challenges for vertical alignment in detail. Against this background, the potential application of techniques from the field of process integration is critically assessed. Based thereon, we identify specific research questions that guide the design of a framework for model alignment. Key words: process model alignment, business-IT gap, model consistency, model correspondences

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Abstract. Process compliance measurement is getting increasing attention in companies due to stricter legal requirements and market pressure for operational excellence. On the other hand, the metrics to quantify process compliance have only been defined recently. A major criticism points to the fact that existing measures appear to be unintuitive. In this paper, we trace back this problem to a more foundational question: which notion of behavioural equivalence is appropriate for discussing compliance? We present a quantification approach based on behavioural profiles, which is a process abstraction mechanism. Behavioural profiles can be regarded as weaker than existing equivalence notions like trace equivalence, and they can be calculated efficiently. As a validation, we present a respective implementation that measures compliance of logs against a normative process model. This implementation is being evaluated in a case study with an international service provider. 1

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Analysis of behavioural consistency is an important aspect of software engineering. In process and service management, consistency verification of behavioural models has manifold applications. For instance, a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation have to be consistent. Another example would be the analysis to what degree a process log of executed business operations is consistent with the corresponding normative process model. Typically, existing notions of behaviour equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, are applied as consistency notions. Still, these notions are exponential in computation and yield a Boolean result. In many cases, however, a quantification of behavioural deviation is needed along with concepts to isolate the source of deviation. In this article, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion. These profiles capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities of a process model. Consistency based on these profiles is weaker than trace equivalence, but can be computed efficiently for a broad class of models. In this article, we introduce techniques for the computation of causal behavioural profiles using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can