The Essential Toolkit for Process Scientists: Comprehension, Compliance and Change

CIRES Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE attended the 23rd International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2025) in beautiful Seville, Spain. BPM is the most prestigious forum for researchers and practitioners in this field. 

For more than four decades, the field of business process management (BPM) has made tremendous contributions as a management paradigm, as an execution and monitoring tool, as a collaborative communication platform, and as a driver of organizational change and transformation. These contributions laid the groundwork for the emerging interdisciplinary field of process science which further expands the notion of process beyond business into scientific, social, and computational realms. As the field advances, researchers and professionals both internal and external to the field may rightfully look to identify the tools and competencies that can make a process scientist successful. 

At BPM 2025, Shazia delivered her keynote “The Essential Toolkit for Process Scientists” structured around three foundational competencies: Comprehension, Compliance, and Change.  

• Comprehension refers to the deep understanding of process dynamics, data, and context, thereby enabling process scientists to model, analyse, and interpret complex workflows.  

• Compliance encompasses the ability to navigate regulatory and policy landscapes, ensure adherence to quality and ethical standards, mitigate risks, and embed governance into process design. 

• Change highlights the capacity to lead transformation, foster innovation, and adapt processes in response to evolving markets, technologies, and stakeholder needs. 

Drawing upon decades of research and practice in BPM, the talk outlined what we have learnt from the past developments in these three critical areas and how they can inform and guide future directions, especially as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) get increasingly embedded in processes.  

Thank you to the organisers for a fantastic conference in such a historic and inspiring setting. 

Conference website: https://www.bpm2025seville.org/

Download the presentation slides

Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE is a globally recognized leader in data and process management, with a 25-year career as a researcher and educator focused on dismantling socio-technical barriers to technology-driven transformation. Her work has significantly advanced the fields of data quality management, scalable data curation process modelling and compliance, and information resilience. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed publications and attracted research funding from the Australian Research Council, industry and various national and international funding bodies. Shazia is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Director for the ARC Industry Transformation Training Centre on Information Resilience 2021-2026, past chair of the National Committee on Information and Communication Sciences at the Australian Academy of Science 2019-2022, and member of The Australian Research Council College of Experts 2018-2021.