An effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the practicality of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current "state-ofthe-art" in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics AbstractAn effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the practicality of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current "state-of-the-art" in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed.

Management and maintenance of IT infrastructure resources such as hardware, software and network is an integral part of software development and maintenance projects. Service management ensures that the tickets submitted by users, i.e. software developers, are serviced within the agreed resolution times. Failure to meet those times induces penalty on the service provider. To prevent a spurious penalty on the service provider, non-working hours such as waiting for user inputs are not included in the measured resolution time, that is, a service level clock pauses its timing. Nevertheless, the user interactions slow down the resolution process, that is, add to user experienced resolution time and degrade user experience. Therefore, this work is motivated by the need to analyze and reduce user input requests in tickets' life cycle.To address this problem, we analyze user input requests and investigate their impact on user experienced resolution time. We distinguish between input requests of two types: real, seeking information from the user to process the ticket and tactical, when no information is asked but the user input request is raised merely to pause the service level clock. Next, we propose a system that preempts a user at the time of ticket submission to provide additional information that the analyst, a person responsible for servicing the ticket, is likely to ask, thus reducing real user input requests. Further, we propose a detection system to identify tactical user input requests.To evaluate the approach, we conducted a case study in a large global IT company. We observed that around 57% of the tickets have user input requests in the life cycle, causing user experienced resolution time to be almost twice as long as the measured service resolution time. The proposed preemptive system preempts the information needs with an average accuracy of 94-99% across five cross validations while traditional approaches such as logistic regression and naive Bayes have accuracy in the range of 50-60%. The detection system identifies around 15% of the total user input requests as tactical. Therefore, the proposed solution can efficiently bring down the number of user input requests and, hence, improve the user-experienced resolution time.

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The variation of contexts in which a Web service could be used and the resulting variation in functional and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements motivates further research to extend Web services platforms to cater for differentiated service offerings and dynamic adaptability. Adaptability is an important requirement in the context of Web services to cater for the need of diverse set of client applications requesting customized view of consumed Web services to fit their own contexts and preferences. This paper presents an ongoing project to devise a novel service composition framework, named AdaptiveBPEL that leverages Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) techniques to "open up" the service composition for dynamic change in order to provide a greater degree of configurability and dynamic adaptability of Web services. This framework can: 1) easily adapt to changes in business rules, and collaboration policies governing service interactions 2) provide different levels of functional and QoS offerings. The adaptation process is policy-driven to declaratively define the adaptive service behavior through dynamic injection of functional and non-functional extensions into a core service composition to allow on-demand and perinstance service adaptability.

Issue reporting and resolution is a software engineering process supported by tools such as Issue Tracking System (ITS), Peer Code Review (PCR) system and Version Control System (VCS). Several open source software projects such as Google Chromium and Android follow process in which a defect or feature enhancement request is reported to an issue tracker followed by source-code change or patch review and patch commit using a version control system. We present an application of process mining three software repositories (ITS, PCR and VCS) from control flow and organizational perspective for effective process management. ITS, PCR and VCS are not explicitly linked so we implement regular expression based heuristics to integrate data from three repositories for Google Chromium project. We define activities such as bug reporting, bug fixing, bug verification, patch submission, patch review, and source code commit and create an event log of the bug resolution process. The extracted event log contains audit trail data such as caseID, timestamp, activity name and performer. We discover runtime process model for bug resolution process spanning three repositories using process mining tool, Disco, and conduct process performance and efficiency analysis. We identify bottlenecks, define and detect basic and composite anti-patterns. In addition to control flow analysis, we mine event log to perform organizational analysis and discover metrics such as handover of work, subcontracting, joint cases and joint activities.

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