Publikation
Event-Driven Business Process Management: Where are we now? - A Comprehensive Synthesis and Analysis of Literature
Julian Krumeich; Benjamin Weis; Dirk Werth; Peter Loos
In: Thomas Kohlborn; Jens Poeppelbuss; Oliver Mueller; Maximilian Roeglinger (Hrsg.). Business Process Management Journal (BPMJ), Vol. 20 (Special Issues on "New Frontiers in Business Process Management"), No. 04, Pages 615-633, Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley, 7/2014.
Zusammenfassung
Purpose:
The business operations of today’s enterprises are heavily influenced by numerous of internal and external business events. With the Event Driven Architecture and particularly the Complex Event Processing (CEP), the technology required for identifying complex correlations in these large amounts of event data right after its appearance, has already emerged. This gain in operational transparency builds the foundation for (near) real-time reactions. This motivated extensive research activities especially in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), which essentially coined the term Event-Driven BPM (EDBPM). Now, several years after the advent of this new concept, the paper at hand sheds light to the question: where are we now on our way towards a sophisticated adoption of the CEP technology within BPM?
Design/methodology/approach:
The research methodology applied to achieve the purpose of this paper is a structured literature analysis. In the process of analyzing literature, the paper follows the methodology proposed by VOM BROCKE ET AL. (2009). This verified five-step process—entitled “Reconstructing the Giant”—allowed a rigorous study. Hence, it forms the basis for deriving various clusters in current EDBPM research and exposing existing research gaps within them.
Findings:
First of all, the paper provides a concise conceptual basis on different application possibilities of the EDBPM concept. Afterwards, the paper synthesizes current research in EDBPM into six disjoint clusters and highlights most significant work within them. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to tackle existing research gaps to pave the way towards fully realizing its potentials.
Originality/value:
A comparable study of the current state-of-the-art of EDBPM is non-existent in literature. The findings of the paper, e.g. the proposed research agenda, helps scholars to focus their research efforts on specific aspects that need to be considered for a more sophisticated adoption of the CEP technology within BPM.