The BPD09 workshop is dedicated to the design, evaluation and comparison of process design or process improvement techniques, tools and methods. It's aim is to provide a snapshot of the current research dedicated to process design and to comprehensively cover process enhancement approaches such as TRIZ, reference (best practice) models, process innovation or resource-based approaches to process improvement. We appreciate diversity in the underlying research methodologies and welcome papers along the entire Design Science-Behavioral Science continuum.

Conscious (re)design of business processes is a powerful means for the pro-active improvement of process performance as well as for the more re-active achievement of higher process conformance. Despite its popularity and obvious pay-offs, process design is still more art than science. Many methodologies on the subject remain relatively vague about how to actually derive superior process designs. The practice of business process design tends to rely on the creativity of business professionals to come up with new process lay-outs, but the outcomes of such efforts are hard to predict. More scientific approaches have focused often on only small, well-understood business domains and are either centered around atomic improvement proposals or rather general reference models. Overall, much more attention is devoted to process modeling techniques and standards. In a way, this is similar to agreeing on the language, without knowing what to say. The aim of this workshop is to continue the ongoing and successful discussions of the last three BPD workshops to further nurture a body of knowledge on the disciplined, well-understood and appropriately evaluated design of business processes.

We have witnessed in the previous BPD workshops that besides research on BPD methodologies, there is a trend and a focus on addressing constraints in process design, user involvement, process reference models and process design quality. Papers that introduce innovative tools for process design as well as soft issues (human aspects) and quantitative aspects (e.g. financial evaluation of proposed process improvements) will be particularly welcome. We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners who have an interest in advancing the state of the art in process design (as in contrast to mere process modeling). We seek contributions by authors who wish to share their innovative ideas and remarkable observations on the subject.

Two main categories of submissions/presentations will be considered:

1. regular papers and
2. industry papers.

All submissions have to follow the procedure explained below under the heading "Paper Submission".