Allen Chan

SLA-driven business process management in SOA

The management of non-functional goals, or Service Level Agreements (SLA), in the development of business processes in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) often requires much manual and error-prone effort by all parties throughout the entire lifecycle of the processes. The formal specification of SLAs into development tools can simplify some of this effort. In particular, the runtime provisioning and monitoring of processes can be achieved by an autonomic system that adapts to changing conditions to maintain the SLAs goals. SOA supports partitioning a system into services that are running in a distributed execution environment. When coupled with an associated cost model, a process can be both executed and monitored in an optimal manner, based on a declarative, user-specified optimality function.

Automating SLA modeling

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the level of service that a service provider must deliver. An SLA is a contract between service provider and consumer, and includes appropriate actions to be taken upon violation of the contractual obligations. However, implementing an SLA using existing IT infrastructure is difficult, requiring a lot of manual effort to translate an SLA into code, model it with the given programming language, and ensure the required monitoring support is available for efficient monitoring and tracking of the SLAs. In this paper, we present a solution for modeling an SLA contract. It is designed to be configurable, reusable, extensible and inheritable, thus providing great flexibility to construct complex SLAs. We also introduce an algorithmic generation pattern to create the necessary artifacts to implement an SLA presented in this paper. The resulting artifacts automatically monitor a business process and evaluate whether the SLA is violated during runtime execution. The proposed approach is designed to require minimal human intervention.

Designing Process Architectures for User Engagement with Enterprise Cognitive Systems

Cognitive capabilities can enhance a business process by offering automated analytics-based recommendations on key decisions by applying machine learning techniques. Yet the organizational adoption of such advanced capabilities is difficult as user acceptance of advice and recommendations from an automated system requires the development of trust over time. Business processes and the processes responsible for user engagement with enterprise cognitive systems need not only to be designed, but also have to change together with the supporting processes that can emerge and evolve over a period of time to monitor, evaluate, adjust, or modify the cognitively-enhanced business processes to enable employees to adapt to the enhanced capabilities of cognitive systems. In this paper, we propose a systematic modeling approach to study and guide the design and configuration of process architectures that help enterprises implement and evolve systems with cognitive capabilities. The use of suitable enterprise modeling techniques can facilitate the exploration and analysis of obstacles to adoption and guide the systematic search for viable modes of interaction and cooperation between a human user and a cognitive system.

Accelerate service integration in your BPM/SOA applications

Service Integration is the core to enabling any BPM and SOA based applications, and is the mechanism we use to enable new Services from existing applications, or create new Services by composing existing Services.

3rd Event-Driven Business Process Management Workshop (edBPM)

Many companies are reporting astronomical increases in event activities in enterprise IT systems worldwide. IBM reports that 72 quadrillion unique business events are generated worldwide each day. Although it is still a daunting task to design and develop systems that are capable of handling this amount of events, this trend constitutes an opportunity to drive the study of efficient, fast, and reliable BPM solutions that give rise to the processing of events at that scale. Gartners recent report projects that market for business intelligence (BI) and business activity monitoring (BAM) will have a compound annual growth rate of 7 to 8% by 2012, and that platforms for enriched event management and processing will be in high demand.