Manfred Reichert was invited keynote speaker at the 12th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K). The purpose of IC3K is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners on the areas of Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K is composed of three co-located conferences, each specialized in at least one of the aforementioned main knowledge areas. IC3K was originally supposed to take place in Budapest, Hungary, from 2 – 4 November 2020, but had to be organized as online conference due to the current pandemic situation.

In his keynote presentation, Manfred gave interesting insights into process management technologies developed at Ulm University during the last decade. In particular, his presentation dealt with the transition from traditional (i.e. activity-centric) process management systems towards data-driven and data-centric ones. He discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these two fundamental approaches and presented emerging perspectives for sophisticated applications from domains like logistics, healthcare and Industry 4.0.  

Manfred Reichert:
From Activity- to Data-centric Approaches to Business Process Management: Challenges, Technologies, Applications
Invited Keynote at IC3K 2020, Budapest, 2 November 2020

Abstract

The utmost importance of data for knowledge-intensive business processes has led to the emergence of data-centric process management approaches. By tightly integrating process and data, which more or less constitute two sides of the same coin, these approaches differ significantly from the widely used activity-centric process paradigm, aiming at the support of semi- or unstructured processes and offering by far the highest flexibility. The progress of a data-centric process depends on the availability of data rather than on the completion of black-box activities. Moreover, the focus has shifted from large, monolithic processes towards small data-driven processes (e.g., object lifecylces), which are running concurrently, but need to interact with each other to reach a given business goal. The keynote speech will give insights into the evolution from activity- to data-centric business process management (BPM) approaches with a focus on process flexibility issues. Moreover, it will deal with fundamental concepts, features and enabling technologies of data-centric approaches to BPM. Finally, it will discuss how data-driven and data-centric process management approaches open up new avenues with respect to the engineering, automation, and monitoring of large-scale business processes in the era of digitization and Industry 4.0.