The research papers of our PhD students, Khurram Shahzad and Constantinos Giannoulis have been accepted for the 5th IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2011). Short summaries of their works, the first on a process analysis approach using warehouses, and the other on business strategy modelling, are provided below:

Towards Goal-driven Access to Process Warehouse: Integrating Goals with Process Warehouse for Business Process Analysis (Shahzad, Zdravkovic)

Analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises and organisations. An emerging approach to analyze business processes is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by employing process-oriented data warehouse and decision making techniques. However, very little work has been done on employing a business orientation in the design and utilization of process warehouse. The approach presented in this paper, addresses that limitation by attempting to integrate business goals with warehouse. The proposed approach to integration spans across two levels, conceptual and implementation; the first defines the concepts that are used to relate goals and process warehouse; the latter is used to implement the concepts and the relations to link warehouse data and goal records for relational databases. The latter is used identify the records that are related with goals. The proposed approach enhances the way users access warehouse data and interpret the data. To facilitate the use of the proposed approach we have developed a prototype. The evaluation results, though preliminary, provides evidence of the usefulness of our approach.

Modeling Business Strategy: A meta-model of Strategy Maps and Balance Scorecards (Giannoulis, Petit, Zdravkovic)

Business strategy is aimed to support the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategy’s execution. However, there is a lack of means to establish and assess the alignment of business strategy and goal oriented requirements engineering.  The objective of our ongoing research is to model business strategy in order to establish well-defined and traceable links with system requirements. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model for Strategy maps and Balance Scorecards. The validity and applicability of the meta-model is demonstrated through a case scenario using OWL and Telos.