Business process management

The BPM (Business Process Management) Conference series has the ambition to be the premier forum for researchersin the area of process-awareinformation systems. It has a recordfor attracting contributions in innovative researchofthe highest quality related to all aspects of business process management including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, and empirical ? ndings. BPM 2009 was the 7th instantiation of this series. It took place in Ulm, G- many, September 8–10, 2009, organized by the Institute of Databases and Inf- mation Systems of the University of Ulm. This volume contains 17 contributed research papers and two contributed industrial papers selected from 116 s- missions from 31 countries. The thorough reviewing process—each paper was reviewed by three to ? ve Program Committee members—was extremely c- petitive as the acceptance rate of 16% indicates. In addition to the contributed papers, these proceedings contain two papers and an outline documenting the invited keynote talks. Furthermore, a report is included on the collaboration structure in BPM research derived from an analysis of papers accepted for all past BPM conferences. In conjunction with the main conference, nine international workshops took place the day before the conference. These workshops fostered the exchange of fresh ideas and experiences between active BPM researchers, and stimulated discussions 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.