Large language models (LLMs) have changed the reality of how software is produced. Within the wider software engineering community, among many other purposes, they are explored for code generation use cases from different types of input. In this work, we present an exploratory study to investigate the use of LLMs for generating smart contract code from business process descriptions, an idea that has emerged in recent literature to overcome the limitations of traditional rule-based code generation approaches. However, current LLM-based work evaluates generated code on small samples, relying on manual inspection, or testing whether code compiles but ignoring correct execution. With this work, we introduce an automated evaluation framework and provide empirical data from larger data sets of process models. We test LLMs of different types and sizes in their capabilities of achieving important properties of process execution, including enforcing process flow, resource allocation, and data-based conditions. Our results show that LLM performance falls short of the perfect reliability required for smart contract development. We suggest future work to explore responsible LLM integrations in existing tools for code generation to ensure more reliable output. Our benchmarking framework can serve as a foundation for developing and evaluating such integrations.
Business Process Visualisations (BPVs) have become indispensable tools for organisations seeking to enhance their operational efficiency, decision-making capabilities, and overall performance. The burgeoning interest in process modeling and tool development, coupled with the rise of data visualisation field, underscores the significant role of visual tools in leveraging human cognition. Unlike traditional models, data visualisation approaches graphics from a novel angle, emphasising the potency of visual representations. This review aims to integrate the domains of BPV and data visualisation to assess their combined influence on organisational effectiveness comprehensively. Through a meticulous analysis of existing literature, this study aims to amalgamate insights on BPVs impact from a data visualisation standpoint, advocating for a design philosophy that prioritises user engagement to bolster organisational outcomes. Additionally, our systematic review has unveiled promising avenues for future research, identifying underexplored variables that influence the efficacy of BPVs, thereby charting a path for forthcoming scholarly inquiries.
Cielo Gonzalez Moyano, Finn Klessascheck, Saimir Bala
et al.
Business Process Management (BPM) is mostly centered around finding technical solutions. Nudging is an approach from psychology and behavioral economics to guide people's behavior. In this paper, we show how nudging can be integrated into the different phases of the BPM lifecycle. Further, we outline how nudging can be an alternative strategy for more sustainable business processes. We show how the integration of nudging offers significant opportunities for process mining and business process management in general to be more human-centric. We also discuss challenges that come with the adoption of nudging.
Data-driven decision making has now moved beyond its traditional domains—operations research, business economics, computer sciences, and business statistics—to “softer subjects,” such as human resource management, organization behavior, and business communication. In this context, teaching with technology encourages students to systematically apply domain knowledge to communicate across a wide variety of stakeholders. In the era of multimodal forms of communication and multiple data sources, management students must be analytical when writing compelling reports and giving persuasive presentations. They should be well versed in using both quantitative and qualitative techniques for report writing and presentation. Drawing on authentic user-generated comments on social media, this article presents two case studies on (a) crisis communication by 30 CEOs and (b) culture shock experienced by foreign tourists sojourning in India, China, and the United Arab Emirates, to demonstrate how master’s in business administration (MBA) students could derive insights from the online comments to make strategic decisions for organizational benefit and make reports based on those findings. The article asserts that this could help to cultivate a data-analytic mindset among the students by preparing them to communicate small (and big) data-driven analysis to relevant stakeholders. It attempts to suggest ways to develop MBA students’ ability to analyze their potential audiences as well as to generate meaningful insights from the available information on social media websites. Finally, it hopes to nudge business communication instructors to embrace multidisciplinary perspectives for planning a technology-based business communication assignment involving the social media landscape. Instructors can not only use the two case studies to illustrate ways to integrate technology with teaching but also create their own mini cases to improve the decision-making, report-writing, and business report presentation skills of their students.
David Chapela-Campa, Ismail Benchekroun, Opher Baron
et al.
Business Process Simulation (BPS) is an approach to analyze the performance of business processes under different scenarios. For example, BPS allows us to estimate what would be the cycle time of a process if one or more resources became unavailable. The starting point of BPS is a process model annotated with simulation parameters (a BPS model). BPS models may be manually designed, based on information collected from stakeholders and empirical observations, or automatically discovered from execution data. Regardless of its origin, a key question when using a BPS model is how to assess its quality. In this paper, we propose a collection of measures to evaluate the quality of a BPS model w.r.t. its ability to replicate the observed behavior of the process. We advocate an approach whereby different measures tackle different process perspectives. We evaluate the ability of the proposed measures to discern the impact of modifications to a BPS model, and their ability to uncover the relative strengths and weaknesses of two approaches for automated discovery of BPS models. The evaluation shows that the measures not only capture how close a BPS model is to the observed behavior, but they also help us to identify sources of discrepancies.
Mojtaba Eshghie, Wolfgang Ahrendt, Cyrille Artho
et al.
Logical flaws in smart contracts are often exploited, leading to significant financial losses. Our tool, HighGuard, detects transactions that violate business logic specifications of smart contracts. HighGuard employs dynamic condition response (DCR) graph models as formal specifications to verify contract execution against these models. It is capable of operating in a cross-chain environment for detecting business logic flaws across different blockchain platforms. We demonstrate HighGuard's effectiveness in identifying deviations from specified behaviors in smart contracts without requiring code instrumentation or incurring additional gas costs. By using precise specifications in the monitor, HighGuard achieves detection without false positives. Our evaluation, involving 54 exploits, confirms HighGuard's effectiveness in detecting business logic vulnerabilities. Our open-source implementation of HighGuard and a screencast of its usage are available at: https://github.com/mojtaba-eshghie/HighGuard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZYVV-slDaY
Business process simulation is a versatile technique to predict the impact of one or more changes on the performance of a process. Mainstream approaches in this space suffer from various limitations, some stemming from the fact that they treat resources as undifferentiated entities grouped into resource pools. These approaches assume that all resources in a pool have the same performance and share the same availability calendars. Previous studies have acknowledged these assumptions, without quantifying their impact on simulation model accuracy. This paper addresses this gap in the context of simulation models automatically discovered from event logs. The paper proposes a simulation approach and a method for discovering simulation models, wherein each resource is treated as an individual entity, with its own performance and availability calendar. An evaluation shows that simulation models with differentiated resources more closely replicate the distributions of cycle times and the work rhythm in a process than models with undifferentiated resources.
This paper elaborates on the sectoral-regional view of the business cycle synchronization in the EU -- a necessary condition for the optimal currency area. We argue that complete and tidy clustering of the data improves the decision maker's understanding of the business cycle and, by extension, the quality of economic decisions. We define the business cycles by applying a wavelet approach to drift-adjusted gross value added data spanning over 2000Q1 to 2021Q2. For the application of the synchronization analysis, we propose the novel soft-clustering approach, which adjusts hierarchical clustering in several aspects. First, the method relies on synchronicity dissimilarity measures, noting that, for time series data, the feature space is the set of all points in time. Then, the ``soft'' part of the approach strengthens the synchronization signal by using silhouette measures. Finally, we add a probabilistic sparsity algorithm to drop out the most asynchronous ``noisy'' data improving the silhouette scores of the most and less synchronous groups. The method, hence, splits the sectoral-regional data into three groups: the synchronous group that shapes the EU business cycle; the less synchronous group that may hint at cycle forecasting relevant information; the asynchronous group that may help investors to diversify through-the-cycle risks of the investment portfolios. The results support the core-periphery hypothesis.
Changes in workflow relevant data of business processes at run-time can hinder their completion or impact their profitability as they have been instantiated under different circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to propose a context engine to enhance a business process management (BPM) system's context-awareness. The generic architecture provides the flexibility to configure processes during initialization as well as to adapt running instances at decision gates or during execution due to significant context change. The paper discusses context-awareness as the conceptual background. The technological capabilities of business rules and complex event processing (CEP) are outlined in an architecture design. A reference process is proposed and discussed in an exemplary application. The results provide an improvement over the current situation of static variable instantiation of business processes with local information. The proposed architecture extends the well-known combination of business rules and BPM systems with a context engine based on CEP. The resulting architecture for a BPM system using a context engine is generic in nature and, hence, requires to be contextualized for situated implementations. Implementation success is dependent on the availability of context information and process compensation options. Practitioners receive advice on a reference architecture and technology choices for implementing systems, which can provide and monitor context information for business processes as well as intervene and adapt the execution. Currently, there is no multi-purpose non-proprietary context engine based on CEP or any other technology available for BPM, which facilitates the adaptation of processes at run-time due to changes in context variables. This paper will stimulate a debate between research and practice on suitable design and technology.
The second half of the twentieth century brought about increased international contacts between people from different origins, which led to changes in the translation studies landscape, impacting conference interpreters as well. Although interpreting scholars acknowledge that interpreters are both linguistic and intercultural mediators, at first glance, culture and intercultural mediation appear to be neglected in the domain of conference interpreting, unlike the domains of community and sign language interpreting.
In this paper, I conduct an analysis on how the established professional discourse and the scholarly literature have portrayed culture and intercultural mediation in conference interpreting. The analysis reveals various conceptualizations of culture and different stances regarding intercultural mediation. Amongst them, reductionist conceptualizations of culture seem to dominate; conceptualizations that have informed the conference interpreting pedagogy. However, this state of affairs contrasts sharply with the current culturally diverse interpreting landscape, what might have an impact on practice and professional identity.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
Communication & professionnalisation conserve ouverts ses numéros thématiques, de sorte à recevoir de nouvelles contributions et ainsi enrichir, de façon incrémentielle, les différents thèmes. Une fois l’appel à contributions considéré comme fermé, les responsables éditoriaux closent le numéro en posant un regard rétrospectif sur les articles reçus.
Communication. Mass media, Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
Public accounting has a social function that consists in guaranteeing credibility, trust and order to the general public. This is possible due to the power that the Colombian State gives to the accounting professional to be able to grant public faith. The fiscal year prints in the public accountant a role of mediator and regulator between the State, companies and citizens. However, a recent publication of Ámbito Jurídico reveals that the conduct most sanctioned by the disciplinary court of the public accountancy is the conduct against the public faith, which invites to think that some accounting professionals, for the pursuit of their own interests, have transgressed its social function. Therefore, this article questions: ¿What structural problems are hindering the moral exercise of public faith? To answer the question, it is proposed to observe public faith from the sociological concept of social action, and thus, to shape the present relationships between public faith, the State, capitalism, the bureaucratic-tech-nocratic administration and the individual. The final reflection of this work indicates that the accounting professional, due to the structural transformations of the current social reality, is carrying with it the social action of the public faith attending two antagonistic behaviors, but validated by the State, such as morality and selfishness.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
Since technology has been involved in the business context, Business and Information Technology Alignment (BITA) has been one of the main concerns of IT and Business executives and directors due to its importance to overall company performance, especially today in the age of digital transformation. Several models and frameworks have been developed for BITA implementation and for measuring their level of success, each one with a different approach to this desired state. The BITA measurement is one of the main decision-making tools in the strategic domain of companies. In general, the classical-internal alignment is the most measured domain and the external environment evolution alignment is the least measured. This literature review aims to characterize and analyze current research on BITA measurement with a comprehensive view of the works published over the last 15 years to identify potential gaps and future areas of research in the field.
Cet article propose une discussion théorique autour de la notion de l’animateur de communauté dans le domaine politique. Plus précisément nous nous intéressons au rôle que ce dernier joue dans l’émergence de débats délibératifs au sein d’échanges ayant lieu sur les pages Facebook de partis politiques allemands. En s’appuyant sur les recherches portant sur les modérateurs de forums politiques et sur la recherche à propos de la gestion de communauté en communication marketing, le texte se questionne sur la relation entre l’animateur de communauté, son public et le parti politique. Ce faisant, trois hypothèses sont élaborées. Premièrement, le statut de l’animateur de communauté au sein de son équipe pourrait jouer un rôle dans le développement des échanges sur les pages en question. Deuxièmement, la modération silencieuse ne favoriserait pas l’émergence de débats. Troisièmement, le maintien de la frontière de l’espace de discussion susciterait des tensions entre internautes et partis politiques. À travers le concept du gatekeeping (contrôle des flux d’information), il est possible de capturer les rapports de force qui se déploient entre la communauté, l’animateur et le parti politique dans ce contexte.
This article reflects a theoretical discussion about the notion of community management in German politics. It shows the role that the community manager plays in exchanges that take place on Facebook pages of political parties. More precisely, the article focuses on the community manager’s influence on the emergence of deliberative debates. Referring to research about moderation of political parties’ discussion forums as well as to marketing and communication studies on community management, this text questions the relation between community manager, its public and the political party. In doing so, three hypotheses are elaborated. First, the community manager’s status within the communication department and the party itself could play a role in the development of exchanges on the pages in question. Second, silent moderation would not favour emergence of debates. Finally, the maintenance of the frontiers defining the sphere of discussion may provoke tensions between the participants and the party. By applying the concept of gatekeeping, we are able to capture the power relations between users, management and political party in this context.
Communication. Mass media, Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
This paper intends to present the opportunities emerging for the national economy, out of the financial crisis. In particular the management of those, which arise from the commercial real estate owned property sector, defined by the author as crisis heritage management. On one hand, as real estate property prices are subject of wide fluctuations, the longer possession of such assets can seriously impact the financial condition of the already shattered financial institutions, but on the on other - with the help of professional and proactive management, and the right kind of attitude by all the stakeholders, the heritage left out of the financial collapse, can not only help stabilize the system - bringing liquidity into it, but can also support its healthy corporate governance in the long-term. The properties themselves (business buildings, warehouses, retail-and-office spaces), being an object of optimization of maintenance costs, re-engineering, intensive marketing, as a result of the crisis, can serve as a solid base for number of new and profitable business and investment opportunities, described in the article, as a proof of the healing effect of the financial crisis and the second chance it gives.
Critical genre analysis (CGA) investigates the impact of context on genres by analyzing interdiscursivity (the integration of discourses in genres), but there has been a shortage of discussion of specific methods. This paper demonstrates that Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) – specifically, statement function analysis – constitutes a very useful approach with which to analyze interdiscursivity in CGA. Analysis of the move of “priorities/goals” (Cornut et al. 2012) in three strategic plans produced by British hospitals using FDA reveals three main discourses: strategic management, public service accountability, and patient centeredness. As interdiscursive analysis reveals the discursive foundations of organizational practices, CGA is well-positioned to make many valuable contributions to organizational research.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence