Business Process Modeling and Implementation

A 3-Year Teaching Experience

Daniela Giordano and Francesco Maiorana

Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Catania, Viale A. Doria, 6, Catania, Italy

Keywords: Business Process Modeling, Workflow Modeling, Petri Nets, Swim Lanes, Novice Errors, MS SharePoint.

Abstract: In this work we describe a three-year teaching experience in an Information Systems course for a

Management Engineering Master degree, where the course's focus was on business process modeling and

on the technical aspects related to process implementation in a commercial software suite. In particular, we

underwent a modeling shift from a Petri Nets description of concurrent processes to a full, business-process

oriented methodology as proposed by Sharp and Mc Dermott (Sharp and McDermott, 2001) (Sharp and

McDermott, 2008). This latter methodology was extended with additional data models, such Entity Life

History, dealing with entities life cycle and dynamics. The students engaged in modeling the business

processes of a real Small Medium Enterprise operating in the local area. The model was implemented using

Microsoft Share Point, which affords a tight integration with databases such as Access or Microsoft SQL

Server. A comparison of the adopted modeling strategies is presented, as well as common student errors in

the design and implementation phase, together with some lessons learnt.

1 INTRODUCTION

Business process modeling is an important topic that

is gaining momentum in modern curricula, both at

the undergraduate and graduate level (Topi et al.,

2010). In a recent review (Bandara et al., 2010) the

authors presents the Business Process Management

(BPM) instruction programs in five universities

around the globe. In their work the author identifies

three major trends in BPM:

1) Methodologies to organize, manage and

measure the organization based on its core

processes;

2) the lean Six-Sigma BPM;

3) The technological trend that focuses on

enabling the organization core process through

BPM platforms emphasizing the technical

aspects of BPM as “a set of new software

technologies that make it easier for IT to

manage and measure the execution of process

workflow and process software applications”

(Harmon and Wolf, 2008).

The authors identify, among the major challenges,

the following ones:

1) difficulties in teaching the technical aspects of

the topic, since both specialized skills and

more time to set up and teach than other

existing courses are required. The higher

workload results, among other things, from

testing in a complex technological environment

in order to offer to the whole class a reliable

platform;

2) only a limited pedagogical research specific to

BPM education is available.

A recent interesting work (Djajalaksana, 2011)

presents the results of a national survey in the United

States on the instructional strategies used related to

teach Information Systems (IS) courses.

This paper aims at contributing to current

pedagogical research in Business Process Modeling

and Management by reporting a teaching experience

carried out in the Information System course of the

Master Degree in Management Engineering, at the

University of Catania. The course was designed at

onset following an approach that seamlessly

integrates two of the three major trends identified in

(Bandara et al., 2010), namely trend 1) and 3); also,

it was based on the use of design precedents,

following an approach that has been extensively

tested in the context of IS courses for Computer

Engineering students (Faro and Giordano, 1998),

(Giordano, 2004). The course was organized around

two main phases: 1) the design phase, with a

methodological approach that aims at integrating the

429

Giordano D. and Maiorana F..

Business Process Modeling and Implementation - A 3-Year Teaching Experience.

DOI: 10.5220/0004387604290436

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 429-436

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

process view, the data view and the user view; and

2) the implementation phase, that by adopting a

software solution made available on line to the entire

community of students allows for a business

workflow implementation in which the students are

shielded from the details of system installation,

configuration and management.

The paper is organized as follows: section 2

presents the teaching context; section 3 details the

pedagogical approaches; section 4 presents some

comparison of the teaching experience; section 5

draws the conclusions and highlights future work.

2 TEACHING CONTEXT AND

CONTENTS

The course is a 6 credits graduate course in

Information Systems for the Management

Engineering degree, requiring 60 hours of lessons

and classroom activities. The students can register in

the course after a prerequisite undergraduate course

in database design, where they have to complete a

project requiring the design of a conceptual model,

its implementation in a Relational Database

Management System (RDBMS), with the option of

prototyping a web interface that exposes the data.

Their only programming experience is with

Visual Basic for Application (VBA) to manipulate

data inside the Microsoft Access RDBMS. About 60

students enroll each year, with a roughly equal

distribution between males and females. The IS

master course has been centered traditionally on

teaching systems analysis and design methodologies,

for business process modeling (Weaver et al., 2002).

The first time when business workflow analysis and

design was introduced was in the 2007/08 academic

year (a.y.) and used Petri net for workflow modeling

(Van der Aalst and Van Hee, 2004); in the 2008/09

a.y. the swim lane workflow modeling and the

complete design methodology proposed by Sharp

and McDermott in (Sharp and McDermott, 2001)

were introduced and refined in the 2009/10

academic year as proposed in (Sharp, 2008), where a

swim-lane “shows what is done, by whom, in what

sequence”. The swim-lane diagram (Figure 1)

shows:

- Actors vertically aligned at the beginning of

the horizontal line, one actor for each line;

- Tasks, represented as rectangles;

- The flow of actions represented by an arrow

from left to right that joins consecutive tasks.

The handoff, represented by an arrow that

crosses the swim-lines of two actors.

Figure 1: An example of a swim-lane involving two actors

performing two tasks with an handoff.

The swim-lane allows to represent constructs such as

sequence, collaborative task, choice, parallel flow,

conditional parallel flow, temporal constraints.

In all the three editions of the course the objectives,

with particular emphasis on the workflow modeling

part, were:

- Acquire the basic techniques and skills for

business process and workflow modeling with

the ability to work out the scope of each

technique, as well as its strengths and

drawbacks.

- Acquire the capacity to use and to program

workflow modeling and management tools.

Complementary objectives were the development

of critical thinking skills, capability to analyze

problems from different perspectives, draw

conclusions and apply these conclusions in the

design phase; as well as improving communication

and collaboration skills.

The lessons typically started with a presentation

of the key concepts, concepts to be applied as soon

as possible in a case study during interactive

sessions, where the solution was often reached with

the intervention of all the students with the teacher

and tutor mostly involved in a facilitator role, with a

recap phase at the end of the design activity. The

interactivity was simply managed by posing a

question, even complex ones such as "design a

system capable of …", and then let the students

work alone or in group during class activities. After

a reasonable amount of time the instructor asked to

the students to volunteer for presenting their

solution. The solution was discussed in class by

letting the students, in turn, ask questions, propose

different designs, compare different solutions and so

on. Each class ended with small assignment meant

as a reinforcement activity requiring a practical

application of the main concepts and methodology

exposed during class. Examples of these small

assignments are: designing from a use case schema

the E/R model, correcting a swim line, designing a

swim line, correcting and designing an E/R schema

and so on. The small assignments were deliberately

not graded but critically discussed in class. The

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

430

choice of no grading policy was meant to increase

the students' confidence and lower the fear in public

intervention. The syllabus of the project for the

2007/08 (a.y.) is presented in Table 1. Particular

emphasis was given to the workflow design and

workflow pattern using Petri Nets. During the course

it was requested to the student to read journal and

conference paper such as (Hammer, 1990) and

(Russell, 2006). The syllabus of the course for the

2008/09 (a.y.) is presented in Table 2.

Table 1: Course syllabus for the 1st edition of the course.

Topic N. hours

Business Process reengineering 2

The five level of analysis: mission; strategy and

goal; Business Process; Presentation; application

logic

Reference model: Set of definitions to describe

the knowledge domain.

Petri Net 6

Petri Net extension: color, time, hierarchical 2

Workflow representation using Petri Net 4

Workflow patterns 4

Total 20

Table 2: Course syllabus for the Workflow modeling in

the 2nd edition of the course (including implementation).

Topic N. hours

Business Process reengineering 2

The five levels of analysis: mission; strategy and

goal; Business Process; Presentation; application

logic

Workflow modeling (business process modeling) 6

Use case and use case scenario (presentation) 2

Transaction modeling (application logic) 2

Entity model (data model) 2

Process identification 2

Initial evaluation and metrics 2

Synthesis poster 2

Tour of Share Point Portal Server and Share

Point designer

Application and site creation. User and groups 1

List and Document library. Web Pages and Web

Part available in SharePoint Designer.

Workflow: conditions and actions available in

Share Point Designer

InfoPath and form design 2

Visual Studio .Net. Workflow Testing 2

Total 30

The Synthesis Poster, according to (Sharp and

McDermott, 2008), “takes the main elements of

framing the process – the process scope and

contents, and the case for action, vision, and

differentiator – and puts them on a single piece of

paper. In the 2009/10 academic year the set of

design tools were incremented with dynamic data

behavior by the Entity Life History.

The workflow was implemented and deployed

using Share Point. In the first edition of the course

some minor attention was given to the installation

and configuration of Microsoft Share Point, attention

that was completely eliminated in the subsequent

editions of the course by giving to the students either

an on-line system or a pre-installed and configured

virtual machine. Share Point was also used for

visualizing OLAP cube in the second module of the

course were data-warehousing was treated.

Share Point Portal server was chosen after a

review of the available collaboration and workflow

suites due to: its tight integration with the Microsoft

Office suite, that is the most used set of tools used in

the industry by business manager; its simple usage

perform a vast set of operations with no need to

develop code; its great flexibility in developing

powerful workflows by designing and coding within

the Visual Studio .Net framework.

The tight integration with the Excel spreadsheet

using the Excel Services, as well as the possibility to

synchronize data with Relational Database

Management Systems (RDBMS) such as Microsoft

Access and Microsoft SQL Server allows the

students to implement and integrate quite easily the

design project developed using the methodology.

The availability of a rich set of conditions and

actions in Share Point, even richer in Web-site

design tools (Share Point Designer) used in the

course, as well as third part components (e.g. for

(D'Urso et al., 2009), allow for a fast prototyping

with no or minimal coding intervention in most

cases. In this way students cognitive effort can focus

on the design activity that is at the core of the

course.

At the end of the course lessons the students had

to develop a project requiring to model the business

processes of a real or simulated Small Medium

Enterprise operating in the local area. Many projects,

however, were based on existing small/medium

enterprises and students designed the existing “as is”

scenario and proposed possible improvements

through the “to be” scenario.

In the project the student had to follow the

methodological approach sketched in Figure 2

(Sharp and McDermott, 2001) and (Sharp and

McDermott, 2008), using the design tools mentioned

above, i.e., the project data model, use cases, an use

case scenario, transactions and process metrics with

detailed specific of the enterprise Information

System.

The students had also to produce a working

prototype of the project developed with Share Point

portal server. The project was not the only element

BusinessProcessModelingandImplementation-A3-YearTeachingExperience

431

to make up the final grading of the course, which

was based on the assessment of three assignments:

1) Quality and usability analysis of an enterprise

web site (20%)

2) Written test with open questions concerning the

theoretical aspects of the course (40 %)

3) Project regarding the complete workflow

analysis of a small/medium enterprise,

including a working prototype of the project

developed with Share Point portal server (40

%).

Figure 2: The BPM methodological approach used for the

project.

The model prototype had to be implemented

using Microsoft Share Point with a tight integration

with databases such as Access or Microsoft SQL

Server and spreadsheets such as Excel.

The project was considered as a capstone to

apply the design methodologies in a real world

scenario, improving creative thinking while

developing better solutions for the “to be” process,

critical thinking while comparing solutions from

peers; improving communications skills (verbal and

written), and collaboration skills during teamwork.

The typical number of team members was three,

allowing for a good deal of interaction and point of

views, yet avoiding overcrowded groups that hinder

tasks and responsibility allocation and often lead to a

lesser engagement by some members of the team.

Tasks and responsibilities were self-allocated by

the students and verified by the tutor.

It was stipulated that in the final presentation of

the project, discussion of the various aspects of the

project from the team members was randomly

chosen despite the original work subdivision. In this

manner all the team members have to know all the

details of the whole project. Along the years, the

business domains have been ranging from insurance

companies, to laboratories for clinical analysis, to

banking, to photovoltaic panels production on

demand, to car workshops, to tour agencies, to an

international food industry and so on.

The tutoring activity was quite demanding,

requiring consultation both on a variegated set of

application domains and on some implementation

and deployment details. Figure 3 represents a

disciplined way of thinking about the tutoring

support activity, using the graphical notation of the

horizontal swim lanes adopted in the course. The

key interactions among the main actors are

highlighted as well as the most relevant aspects in

the tutoring process.

The project presentation, performed by the tutor,

is concerned with highlighting the main goals of the

final project, the grading policy and some project

management issues. Then the teams freely choose

the application domain of their work also by

consulting a shared pool of former projects, as in

(Giordano, 2004). The student are also required to

peer review one project of their colleagues. The first

year that the business workflow was introduced in

the course, given the discontinuity with the former

methodology, the support that could be obtained

from the pool of previous projects was limited to

getting a sense of the complexity of the various

business domains and to seeing instances of the

applications of use cases and E/R modelling,

whereas the actual workflow and business processes

were "hidden" in the Data Flow Diagrams, instead of

being explicit in swim-lanes. In the third year of the

course, the "shared memory" of the course provided

a more stable and comprehensive resources pool

reflecting the consolidation of the methodology

adopted for BPM.

At the end of this consultation phase the team

produces a project proposal that is evaluated by the

tutor. If approved, the team starts working on the

project and submits project milestones to the tutor,

who reviews the milestones following a guided

inquiry process. Meetings with the tutor are

scheduled upon teams' request.

The process ends with the final deliverable

preparation, where students produce the entire

design, highlighting each major decision taken and

explaining the reasons behind the decision, possibly

comparing two or more different approaches to the

same problem. After the final deliverable is

approved by the tutor the project is presented and

discussed, together with the working prototype, in

the final presentation in front of the teacher and the

tutor.

The workflow schema in Figure 2 can help in a

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

432

Figure 3: Project management workflow.

better management of the whole project

development phase, by offering a clear view of all

the phases and progresses, and thus facilitating the

communication among all the actors involved,

namely students, tutor and professor, also through

documents exchange.

Work can be found in literature describing the

advantage of using a collaborative system, such as

Share Point, to improve interaction among teacher,

tutor and students such as (Rockinson-Szapkiw,

2011) or to improve content management

(Tallapragada et al., 2012).

The project required 4 to 6 weeks work for

completion after the end of classes.

3 PEDAGOGICAL HIGHLIGHTS

The main pedagogical approaches and instructional

strategies followed during the course are the

following:

1) Use and sharing of previous projects and

experience: students used and reviewed the

projects from the previous academic years

in a "shared memory" fashion (Giordano,

2004). Projects are shared without the final

teacher feedback, thus encouraging critical

analysis.

2) Using interactive lesson focused on

reviewing cases, and on in class

collaborative analysis and design of a

solution for small practical cases;

3) A guided inquiry style of interaction, both

in class and in the tutoring sessions during

project development;

4) Video screen recordings of the technical

implementation procedure inside the Share

Point portal server.

Especially during the tutoring and reviewing

sessions, care was taken to avoid both a "no

intervention" approach and a "solution offering"

approach.

The teacher, in the role of facilitator of

knowledge building, especially with the most

brilliant students, answered the questions with

further questioning, and in general, guided the

students to discovering the solution, by offering

practical small exercises as guidance to solving the

problem, by suggesting to reviewing study materials

and so on.

4 CRITICAL COMPARISON

AND LESSONS LEARNT

The overall appreciation of the course was good as

pointed out from student active participation in the

lessons, effort put in the projects and answers to

informal questions such as “what have you learned

during the course?” The performance of the students

in terms of grades was overall steady, more biased in

the direction of higher grades, despite the increasing

load in terms of concepts and competences they had

to grasp.

In general, allowing the students to be immersed

in a real world scenario, focusing on real problems,

communicating and collaborating with the local

enterprise domain expert and so on, was a definitive

pro in the course.

We also agree with (Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2011)

that, especially for older students with a more

BusinessProcessModelingandImplementation-A3-YearTeachingExperience

433

comprehensive background and better reasoning

skills, allowing them to choose the domain of

application of the business process modeling

methodology, or the “surface agenda”, tied with

their personal story, background and interests,

greatly improves student involvement and

participation in the project.

In this way the teachers and the tutor maintain

the responsibility in choosing the methodologies,

leaving the students to apply it in their preferred

domain.

In particular, concerning an overall assessment

of the quality of learning and of the efficiency of the

pedagogical strategies adopted, taking into account

the changes in methodology introduced in the three

years, it is worth remarking the following points.

‐ Use of a complete design methodology such as

the Sharp and McDermott one has several

advantages compared with the usage of a single

design tool such as Petri Nets. A comparison of

the students usage of swim lane and Petri Nets

design tool for workflow modeling, based on

the frequency of requested tutoring

interventions and on observing the speed by

which the student were able to sketch a

workflow on the fly in front of the tutor seem to

suggest a steeper learning curve for Petri Nets.

One of the reasons why swim lanes, and in

particular the horizontal swim lanes proposed in

the methodology could be easier to learn could

be found in the visual span asymmetry

(McConkie and Rayner, 1975; Pollatsek et al.,

1981): for readers from left to right a visual

span asymmetry consisting of 3-4 characters to

the left of fixation vs.14-15 characters to right

of fixation has been demonstrated. The swim

lanes organization in different levels allows for

an easier top-down design approach focusing in

the overall process in the first level and

increasing the detail in the second and third

level. Overall, swim-lanes are more suited for a

managerial environment; Petri Net are, of

course, more suited for formal proof of

correctness or synchronization.

‐ Using a complete methodology and a plurality

of design tools and representations allows, in

general, for a deeper understanding of the

problem at hand resulting in a better analysis

and design that take advantage from the

interrelationship among the design tools

(Giordano, 2002), which provides means for

cross-verification and improvements of the

design artifact under development. From a

pedagogical standpoint it is a best practice to

present as earlier as possible the application of

all the needed design tools, starting from a small

project and incrementally enlarging it step by

step in order to let the student to deeply

understand, integrate and use all the design

methodologies. However, some limitations to

the efficacy of self-correction of the

methodology through cross-verification can be

noted, as exemplified in the type of errors

detected in the students projects, listed below.

‐ The most common errors detected in the

students' deliverables are the following:

a) Incomplete swim lane because of missing

handoff. The most relevant cases are: a) not

informing the client of a decision, and b)

incomplete management of the revision cycle

of a document or a production phase

b) E/R diagram errors, especially concerning the

correct usage of the association entity and how

to associate an item in a N-N association with

other entities;

c) Inconsistency between different design models,

e.g., information present in the use case

scenario and missing in the E/R diagram;

inconsistency between the ELH and the swim

lane, such as a missing event in the ELH,

presence of an irrelevant event in the ELH,

inconsistency between use case scenario and

swim lane;

d) Incorrect identification of the critical success

factors in business process modeling, and in

particular, confusing process and product

metrics.

The above type of errors, on the one hand, point to

the aspects that deserve special attention and

reiteration in communicating with the students

during the in-class and tutoring interactions; on the

other hand, they reflect the fact that the efficacy of

any analysis and design methodology as a self-

correcting instrument, can be affected by limited

knowledge or practice with more advanced data

modeling concepts and by the higher cognitive load

involved in coordinating representations dealing

with temporal aspects of processes and entities,

respectively.

‐

The use of the shared pool of previous projects,

increased the quality of the final deliverable

over time, especially in the last observed year.

The shared projects database can be used to

evaluate the didactic experience and objectively

measure student improvements. This is in line

with the approach adopted in (Giordano, 2002)

and, more recently, in (Paul, 2012) and

(Tenenberg and Mccartney, 2008) where the

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

434

authors suggest to look systematically at

students' artifact to derive data that can provide

insights into questions about learning. From a

preliminary analysis of the student projects over

the years we can observe:

o Increased complexity of the analysis and the

design, as measured by the number of

processes, actors, and steps in the processes in

the swim lanes, and by the number of entities

and association entities in the E/R diagram

o Increased degree of associations between the

platform (Share Point Portal Server) and the

underlying databases.

Table III shows some aggregate measures of

these improvements between the 2008/09 and the

2009/10 academic years, computed on a random

sample of 5 projects from each year cohort. The

table reports the average percentage of

improvement, if positive, for the 09/10 academic

year over the previous one.

This preliminary data suggest an overall increase

of the complexity of the analyzed process in the last

year: a larger number of swim lanes both at the

handoff level (Level 1) and the Milestone level

(Level 2); a greater number of steps performed by

less actors, increased number of tables, a smaller

number of use cases explained in more detail, as

indicated by the increase in use case scenarios, an

increased number of transactions and an increased

number of steps implemented in SharePoint.

Use case scenario, according to (Hamer et al.,

2008) “depicts the dialogue between an actor and a

system for a particular scenario”.

The observed increase in overall design

complexity, although based on a limited sampling

aimed at preliminary exploration of the data, is in

line with the effect of "organizational learning"

discussed in (Giordano, 2002) and (Giordano, 2004)

when a shared memory of design artifacts is in

place.

Concerning the technological challenge of

setting up a relatively complex environment, prior

installation of a virtual machine was made available

on line and also distributed using a DVD upon

students' request.

This allowed to eliminate all the steps required

for software installation (operating system,

Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL server and

Microsoft Share Point Portal Server) and

configuration, and all students could working on the

same initial configuration, thus facilitating

debugging.

Screen video recordings greatly reduced the

tutoring burden over implementation issues,

Table3: Comparison of two academic years projects

cohorts: average number of handoff swim-lanes (L1),

average number of milestone swim lanes (L2), average

number of actors (A), steps (S), tables (T), use cases (UC),

use case scenario (UCS), transactions (T) and Microsoft

Share Point steps (SPS).

Year L1 L2 #A # S #T

UCS

#T # SPS

09/10 3,0 0,6 5,5 20,7 10,8 5,4 3,6 8,6 7,2

08/09 2,0 0,4 6,4 13,0 10,2 7,8 0,2 3,8 4,8

Increase

(%)

5 50 -14 60 6 -31 n.a. 1 50

allowing the teacher, tutor and students to focus on

the design phase, since the students to perform the

practical operations at their own pace and resolve

most of the technical problem by themselves.

5 CONCLUDING REMARKS

In this work we described a three-year teaching

experience in an Information System master course

for Management Engineering students, with a focus

on business process modeling.

The shift from workflow analysis and design

using Petri Nets to a comprehensive methodology

where Business Processes are modeled according to

swim lanes affords several advantages. Technical

aspects related to process implementation in a

commercial software suite could be tackled by

decreasing the implementation and deployment

detail as much as possible.

As a further study we plan a more thorough

comparison of the different approaches and

methodologies that we have field-tested, by adapting

the analytical evaluation grid provided in (Giordano,

2002) to include swim-lanes and process metrics,

and applying it to analyze larger samples from the

available cohorts of project artifacts.

This analysis will involve relating any detected

misconceptions to evidence on how the students

have coordinated the various analysis and design

notations and to any common feature of the modeled

enterprise/business domain.

The observed increase in overall design

complexity, although based on a limited sampling

aimed at preliminary exploration of the data, is in

line with the effect of "organizational learning"

discussed in (Giordano, 2002, 2004, 2009)

when a shared memory of design artifacts is in

place to reuse past experience.

BusinessProcessModelingandImplementation-A3-YearTeachingExperience

435

REFERENCES

Bandara, W., Chand, D. R., Chircu, A. M., Hintringer, S.,

Karagiannis, D., Recker, J. C., van Rensburg, A.,

Usoff, C. and Welke, R. J., 2010. Business process

management education in academia: Status,

challenges, and recommendations. Communications of

the Association for Information Systems, 27, 743-776.

Djajalaksana, Y. M, 2011. A National Survey of

Instructional Strategies Used to Teach Information

Systems Courses: An Exploratory Investigation.

ProQuest LLC. Available at:

http://www.proquest.com/en-

US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.

D'Urso, D., Giordano, D., Maiorana, F., Chiacchio, F.,

2009. Coding softly a SME-targeted information

systems: towards the lean ERP age. In Proc. of the

11th Int. Conf. on The Modern Information

Technology in the Innovation Processes of Industrial

Enterprises (MITIP' 09).

Faro, A. and Giordano, D., 1998. StoryNet: an evolving

network of cases to learn information systems design.

IEE Proceedings Software, 145, 4, 119-127.

Giordano, D., 2002. Evolution of interactive graphical

representations into a design language: a distributed

cognition account. International Journal of Human-

Computer Studies, 57, 4, 317-345.

Giordano, D., 2004. Shared values as anchors of a learning

community: A case study in information systems

design. Journal of Educational Media, 29, 3, 213-227.

Giordano, D., Faro, A., Maiorana, F., Pino, C.,

Spampinato, C., 2009. Feeding back learning

resources repurposing patterns into the

"information loop": Opportunities and challenges. 9th

International Conference on Information Technology

and Applications in Biomedicine,

ITAB 2009, Larnaca.

Hamer, J., Cutts, Q., Jackova, J., Luxton-Reilly, A.,

McCartney, R., Purchase, H., Riedesel, C., Saeli, M.,

Sanders, K. and Sheard, J., 2008. Contributing

student pedagogy. SIGCSE Bull., 40, 4, 194-212.

Hammer, M., 1990. Reengineering Work: Don’t

Automate, Obliterate. Harvard Business Review, 7/8,

104-112.

Harmon, P., and Wolf, C., 2008. The State of Business

Process Management — 2008, BPTrends, available at:

http://www.bptrends.com/surveys_landing.cfm.

McConkie, G. and Rayner, K., 1975. The span of the

effective stimulus during a fixation in reading.

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 17, 6, 578-

586.

Paul, J., 2012. Living in a computing world: a step

towards making knowledge of computing accessible to

every student. ACM Inroads, 3, 2, 78-81.

Pollatsek, A., Bolozky, S., Well, A. D. and Rayner, K.,

1981. Asymmetries in the perceptual span for Israeli

readers. Brain and Language, 14, 1, 174-180.

Rockinson-Szapkiw, A.J., 2011. Improving doctoral

candidates’ persistence in the online dissertation

process In Z. Abas et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global

Learn Asia Pacific.

Russell, N., ter Hofstede, AHM. van der Aalst, WMP,

Mulyar, N., 2006. Workflow Control-Flow Patterns: A

Revised View. BPM Center Report BPM-06-22,

BPMcenter.org. 2006. Available at:

http://workflowpatterns.com/documentation/document

s/BPM-06-22.pdf. Accessed September 7, 2012.

Sharp, A. and McDermott, P., 2001. Workflow Modeling:

Tools for Process Improvement and Application

Development, 1st Edition Artech House.

Sharp, A. and McDermott, P., 2008. Workflow Modeling:

Tools for Process Improvement and Application

Development, Artech House, 2nd Edition.

Tallapragada, K., Chewning, J., Kombo, D. and Ludwick,

B., 2012. Making SharePoint® Chemically Aware™.

Journal of Cheminformatics, 4, 1 (2012), 1-7.

Tenenberg, J. and Mccartney, R., 2008. Grounding the

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Practice. J.

Educ. Resour. Comput., 8, 2 (2008), 1-3.

Topi, H., Valacich, J. S., Wright, R. T., Kaiser, K. M.,

Nunamaker,J. F., Sipior J. C. and de Vreede, G., 2010.

IS 2010: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate

Degree Programs in Information Systems.

Communications of the Association for Information

Systems 26 (2010), pp. 359-428.

Van der Aalst, W. and Van Hee, K.M., 2004. Workflow

management: models, methods, and systems. Mit

Press.

Weaver, P., Lambrou, N., Walkley, M., 2002. Practical

Business Systems Development Using SSADM. A

complete tutorial guide. 3d Edition, Prentice Hall.

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

436