Looking for master thesis!

Hi Amir,

I think a first decision to take is whether you want to do your thesis at a company who is applying BPM or a company who is offering BPM products and services. The second case might limit your choices. For example, it will depend a lot on how far you can travel and what your contacts are. The first case is easier to achieve. Just take a look around in your local area which companies exist and if they have done a thesis with your university before.

BPM is done with many different names. It might happen that a company does not call it BPM even though they are doing it. For example, in software engineering people often speak about continuous process improvement, but from a more abstract point of view it is BPM (improving the business process of producing software). In addition, you will have to decide if you want to focus on the technological part of BPM (process automation, workflow management, enterprise application integration) or on the softer side originating from business administration.

By the way, greetings to Sweden. KTH is a very good university. Back then, I had to decide whether I go to BTH or KTH and finally decided for BTH. Still, a university with a long tradition!

Regards,

Sebastian

Hi dear Sebastian,

Thanks a lot for your tips. It's a little tricky to find companies based on these different names for BPM  and also to find out who exactly do what.

regards,

Amir

Hi Dear Amir,

I’m currently finishing my master thesis in the BPM area, but it hasn’t been published yet. I suppose it’s going to take two months until the final version is ready… If you could wait...

If this is of your interest, my thesis deals with the alignment of goal models (using the Tropos methodology) and business process models (using Aris). There is another interesting master thesis in my research group (http://nemo.inf.ufes.br/en) which focuses on ontologies for increasing the quality of MDD techniques for automation of business processes (modeled in Aris) (but unfortunately, it is written in Portuguese and also hasn’t been published yet) :(

 Best regards

Evellin

Hello dear Evellin,

Thanks a lot for your comment. Yes, that's true, I am a little new to this community and should learn to work with it! Actually, my first priority is to find a master thesis or internship within a company in BPM and want to know how this field of research is applied in their practices. I really like to work in such environment like R&D department of a company.Do you have any comments regarding how to find such companies or something like that?

Regards,

Amir

Hi Dear Amir,

By your explanation, I suppose you are interested in academic projects with real BPM applications, right?

With that respect, my master thesis has been conducted in a health care organization (in a department of a hospital here in Brazil). I also have two papers in which I report real case studies with the usage of BPM. In the first one, I report how goals of business processes have been elicited from the organizational domain (in this case, the department of a hospital). In the second one, I report how business process can be used as a starting point to derive alternative sets of requirements for a process-oriented system (in this case, the organization was a human resource department of a large organization). If these are of your interest, the papers are:

CARDOSO, E., ALMEIDA, J.A., GUIZZARDI, G. Eliciting Goals for Business Process Models with Non-Functional Requirements Catalogs, International Workshop on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support (BPMDS), together with the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAISE’09), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP), Springer-Verlag

CARDOSO, E.; ALMEIDA, J.P.A.; GUIZZARDI, G. Requirements Engineering Based on Business Process Models: A Case Study, 13th International Conference on Enterprise Computing (EDOC 2009), Auckland, New Zealand, 2009.

If you have some difficulty in finding them, you can request me by e-mail :).

Concerning the issue of finding organizations which apply the BPM in association with academic projects, I think this is a little bit harder issue :( … In fact, in the course of my research, I have found few academic works which have addressed the issue of eliciting/refining goals in the scope of BPM in a real organization… The general impression I had is that although the topic of goals is well explored in the context of BPM, the application in real cases are little explored … I have found many academic works which aim at aligning goal models and business process models, but with theoretical examples.

An interesting paper with a real case study is: A strategy driven business process modelling approach Authors: Nurcan, Selmin; Etien, Anne; Kaabi, Rim; Zoukar, Iyad; Rolland, Colette Source: Business Process Management Journal, Volume 11, Number 6, 2005 , pp. 628-649(22) Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

I suppose that academic projects which report BPM applications in real organizations are more explored in the context of system development with the usage of business process models for derivation of system designs. Unfortunately, since i focus on the integration of goal models with BP models, I don’t know the references…

Well, if you desire to know my impressions about this subject, you can also contact me by e-mail :)

 

Best regards

Evellin