In recent years the management of business processes has emerged as one of
the major developments to ease the understanding of, communication about,
and evolution of process-oriented information systems in a variety of application
domains. Based on explicit representations of business processes, process
stakeholders can communicate about process structure, content, and possible
improvements. Formal analysis, verification and simulation techniques have the
potential to show deficits and to effectively lead to better and more flexible
processes. Process mining facilitates the discovery of process specifications from
process logs that are readily available in many organizations.
This volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science contains the
papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Business Process Management
(BPM 2004) which took place in Potsdam, Germany, in June 2004.
From more than 70 submissions BPM 2004 received, 19 high-quality research
papers were selected.
BPM 2004 is part of a conference series that provides a forum for researchers
and practitioners in all aspects of business process management. In June 2003,
the 1st International Conference on Business Process Management took place
in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Its proceedings were published as Volume 2678
of Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer-Verlag. A previous volume
(LNCS 1806) on Business Process Management was based on four events devoted
to this topic.