Alexander Kofman

Integrating complex events for collaborating and dynamically changing business processes

Business processes must become agile, respond to changes in the business environment in a timely manner and quickly adapt themselves to new conditions. Event-Driven Business Process Management (ED-BPM) is an enhancement of Business Process Management (BPM) by concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). The most important enhancement is the integration of services accessible via the Internet that fire events into global event clouds. The events can be processed by event processing platforms for aggregating the information into higher value complex business events. These events can be modeled in a business process execution language within a process driven Business Process Management System (BPMS) to trigger changes in control flow of a process or start other services. A reference model and a reference architecture for ED-BPM are presented, based on the NEXOF Reference Architecture. A taxonomy for classifying changes to process flow is proposed. Enhancements have to be applied to the existing standards in the BPM field, including both the design-time and the runtime. A scenario from the banking domain illustrates the main concepts and principles.

Roles, rights, and responsibilities: Better governance through decision rights automation

At its essence software development governance is about guiding the development organization so that it produces value that aligns with the needs of the business. As software development platforms mature they provide increasingly sophisticated capabilities for process measurement and guidance. These new capabilities in turn offer an excellent opportunity for governance tools to help guide the development. In this paper we discuss a model of the development organization that includes: roles, responsibilities, decisions, rights, artifacts and their lifecycles. We show how this model can be elicited and deployed as part of a governance solution to guide the development organization and provide a description of a prototype we have built to automate this process. We conclude with a discussion and important directions for future work in the area.

Challenges in collecting and using mobile's location-based data

In recent years we have been witness to rapidly growing adoption and spread of smart mobile devices, not only for personal use but also by enterprises. An important feature provided by majority of these devices is location awareness – ability to detect the device’s location on Earth and use it in applications. For enterprises, there is tremendous value in ability to leverage location context in business logic. However, implementing location awareness in enterprise environments introduces new challenges, both technical and organizational. In this paper we present and discuss main technical challenges associated with building location aware enterprise software systems.