Business Process Management

BPM2008isthesixth internationalconferencein aseriesthatprovidesthemost distinguished specializedforum for researchersandpractitioners in business p- cess management (BPM). The conference has a record of attracting innovative researchofthehighestqualityrelatedtoallaspectsofBPMincludingtheory,fra- works,methods,techniques,architectures,standards,andempirical?ndings. BPM 2008 was held in Milan, Italy, on September 2-4, 2008, and was or- nizedbytheInformationSystemsResearchGroupoftheDepartmentofElectr- icsandInformationofthePolitecnicodiMilano.Thepresentvolumecontainsthe research,industry,andprototypedemonstrationpapersacceptedforpresentation atthe conference. This year, we received 154 full paper submissions. These submissions came from authors located in 36 di?erent countries, geographically distributed as f- lows: 101 submissions originated from Europe, 19 from Australia, 16 from Asia, 14 from America, and 4 from Africa. As in previous years the paper selection process was extremely competitive. After a thoroughrefereeing process in which every paper was reviewed by between 3 and 5 program committee members, only 23 of the 154 submissions were accepted, leading to an acceptance rate just below 15%. Among the 23 accepted papers, there are 20 research papers and 3 industry papers. In additionto these 23 papers,3 invited keynotepresentationsweredelivered by Paul Harmon (Executive Editor and Founder, BPTrends, USA), Michael Rosemann (Queensland University of Technology, Australia), and Peter Dadam (University of Ulm, Germany). We are very grateful to the keynote speakers for their contributions. In conjunction with the main conference, nine international workshops took placethe daybeforethe conference.Theseworkshopshavefosteredthe exchange of ideas and experiences between active BPM researchers, and stimulated d- cussions on new and emerging issues in line with the conference topics. The proceedings with the papers of all workshops will be published in a separate volume of Springer's Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing series.