SIGBPS is a special interest group of the Association of Information Systems, which strives to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners interested in new research directions in the area of business process management and business service automation. SIGBPS stems from the Special Interest Group on Process Automation and Management (SIGPAM - www.sigpam.org) by broadening its scope. Our new scope of research encompasses business process automation by including research topics related to business processes and services such as knowledge management, cloud computing, business intelligence, and big data analysis. Our rationale is that business processes and services must be offered in various business and technological contexts. As such, it is more effective to study and resolve these business and technological issues as a whole. We hope that this special interest group will be a vibrant research community that houses many people with similar interests in this multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological area.

SIGBPS (www.sigbps.org) aims to extend the boundaries of research in business process management by integrating new elements that have not been sufficiently emphasized in the past (www.sigpam.org). The recent rapid advances in information systems have created both challenges and opportunities to develop new business services via innovative business processes. For instance, we know how to automate routine, formal business processes but have not really attempted computerizing ad hoc processes that may emerge spontaneously and have short life span. These may include examples like setting up ad hoc meetings that may involve a number of people from different places, different IT devices and platforms, an evolving agenda, a set of documents as inputs and outputs and some decisions and outcomes. Such meetings are often very valuable but also time consuming to organize and manage.

An important area of interest of this workshop is to promote theoretical efforts in business processes. The business process modeling and automation research has been largely driven by the need to solve practical problems. There has been a lack of strong theories in this area and we believe that it is essential to develop new theories about business process and service automation. The Process Virtualization Theory (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1085328), proposed by Eric Overby, presents an excellent example of such theories and provides a great starting point for a theoretical discussion.

A very important activity of SIGBPS is to hold an annual conference called SIGBPS Workshop on Business Processes and Services (www.sigbps.org/bps12) as an ancillary conference of ICIS.

Contact Info

J. Leon Zhao

SIGBPS Chair
City University of Hong Kong, China
Email: jleonzhao@gmail.com

Shaokun Fan

Webmaster
City University of Hong Kong, China
Email: fsk1234@gmail.com