CAiSE09 chapter proposal accepted: Empowering Full Scale STP with BPM

"We are pleased to inform you that your chapter proposal Empowering Full Scale Straight Through Processing with BPM has been selected to be worked out as a full chapter for Practice-driven Research on Enterprise Transformation."

Those magic words never get old!

My proposed paper accepted to CAiSE'09 conference (Computer Aided Information Systems Engineering) which will be held in Amsterdam. The CAiSE'09 conference will also host the PRET workshop (Practice-driven Research on Enterprise Transformation). This PRET workshop was my target and I am glad to have found a home for this long running project which was submitted to BPM 2008.

Next deadline is to submit a final copy of the paper for evaluation by January 1, 2009. I will post the draft version as soon as I get it sorted out.

Abstract

As one of the larger Dutch financial institutions, SNS Bank in the Netherlands has made a strategic decision to empower her customers on-line by fully automating her business processes. The ability to facilitate the customer is achieved by applying Business Process Modelling (BPM) techniques in her existing selling channels. Both the publicly available and internal processes are being revamped to provide the customer with an online full scale Straight Through Processing (STP) experience. This extreme use of online STP is the trigger in a shift that is of crucial importance to cost effective banking in an ever turbulent and changing financial world. The key elements used in implementing these goals continue to be (Free) Open Source Software (FOSS), Service-oriented architecture (SOA), and BPM. In this paper we will present an industr1y application describing the efforts of the SNS Bank to make the change from traditional banking services to a full scale STP and BPM driven Do It Yourself bank.

We will begin with a look at the the components used to implement the case study, a project entitled STP Purchasing. The basis has been laid in a FOSS environment with which the first SOA services were constructed and an initial selling channel was modelled for implementation within our chosen BPM framework. The issues encountered along the way to completion of this project will be discussed to provide some insights into our first experiences in this solution space.

We will then take a closer look at the positive impact made through the use of full scale STP and BPM. Not only will we present extensive empirical data resulting from the STP Purchasing project running in production over the last year, but we will also examine the effects this has had on customer contact and the development process as a whole.

As can be expected, there always will be challenges to be met when such an expansive shift in strategy is being implemented and we take a tour of the impact this has in both the business and technical realms.

Finally, we present our conclusions and detail some of the steps that are being taken (or are in the planning) as a result of our initial experiences with STP Purchasing.