Andrea Delgado

An integrated approach based on execution measures for the continuous improvement of business processes realized by services

Context: Organizations are rapidly adopting Business Process Management (BPM) as they focus on their business processes (BPs), seeing them to be key elements in controlling and improving the way they perform their business. Business Process Intelligence (BPI) takes as its focus the collection and analysis of information from the execution of BPs for the support of decision making, based on the discovery of improvement opportunities. Realizing BPs by services introduces an intermediate service layer that enables us to separate the specification of BPs in terms of models from the technologies implementing them, thus improving their modifiability by decoupling the model from its implementation. Objective: To provide an approach for the continuous improvement of BPs, based on their realization with services and execution measurement. It comprises an improvement process to integrate the improvements into the BPs and services, an execution measurement model defining and categorizing several measures for BPs and service execution, and tool support for both. Method: We carried out a systematic literature review, to collect existing proposals related to our research work. Then, in close collaboration with business experts from the Hospital General de Ciudad Real (HGCR), Spain, and following design science principles, we developed the methods and artifacts described in this paper, which were validated by means of a case study. Results: We defined an improvement process extending the BP lifecycle with measurement and improvement activities, integrating an execution measurement model comprising a set of execution measures. Moreover, we developed a plug-in for the ProM framework to visualize the measurement results as a proof-of-concept prototype. The case study with the HGCR has shown its feasibility. Conclusions: Our improvement vision, based on BPs realized by services and on measurement of their execution, in conjunction with a systematic approach to integrate the detected improvements, provides useful guidance to organizations.

MINERVA: model driven and service oriented framework for the continuous business process improvement and related tools

The importance and benefits of Business Process Management (BPM) for organizations are nowadays broadly recognized, as not only the business area but also the information technology one are embracing and adopting the paradigm. The implementation of business processes as services helps in reducing the gap between these two areas, easing the communication and understanding of business needs. Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of the joint application of these two paradigms, some issues still need to be addressed; being a key one the automatic generation of services from business process models. In this article, we present MINERVA framework which applies Model Driven Development (MDD) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigms to business processes for the continuous business process improvement in organizations, supporting the different stages defined in the business process life cycle from modeling to evaluation of its execution.

From BPMN business process models to SoaML service models: A transformation-driven approach

Business process modeling, simulation, deployment, execution and evaluation support have been improved in last years, through research efforts from both the academic field and industry. Organizations are now aware of the importance of explicitly defining the business processes of which their businesses are comprised realizing them by means of services. Service support helps to reduce the gap between the areas of Business and Information Technology (IT), thus easing the communication and understanding of business needs. Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Computing (SOC) and Model Driven Development (MDD) paradigms are integrated, based on standards and tools which support them. MINERVA is a framework that aims to provide such an integrated solution. In this paper we present the MINERVA proposal for automating transformations from BPMN to SoaML models in order to automatically generate services from business processes.

Business process service oriented methodology (BPSOM) with service generation in SoaML

Carrying out business processes by means of software services helps to close the business-systems gap, by introducing an intermediate layer between business process definition and software systems, thus permitting not only better independence, but also more traceability between them. Despite the fact that technologies have matured to support this new reality, there is a lack of methodologies and notations, although some have been proposed to guide service development with different visions of service design and implementation. Service modeling is the basis for, among other things, the automation of several development steps by means of the model-driven development paradigm. The SoaML standard is a major step towards service modeling in UML. In this paper we extend our Business Process Service Oriented Methodology (BPSOM) for service development from business processes by integrating two main aspects: service modeling using SoaML and QVT transformations to obtain SoaML service models from BPMN BP models.

Towards an ontology for service oriented modeling supporting business processes

The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm is nowadays applied as the preferred way to implement business processes. Services provide the support required by organizations for organizational agility, helping in closing the gap between the business and the systems areas by relating them while detaching business process definition from its technical implementation. Several existing standards gives different visions of the concepts involved in service oriented development, making it difficult to get a clear relation between services and business processes. In this article an ontology proposal containing the most relevant concepts for service oriented and business process modeling is presented, along with a comparison analysis between the existing standards for service orientation.

A Systematic Approach for Evaluating BPM Systems: Case Studies on Open Source and Proprietary Tools

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide support for modeling, developing, deploying, executing and evaluating business processes in an organization. Selecting a BPMS is not a trivial task, not only due to the many existing alternatives, both in the open source and proprietary realms, but also because it requires a thorough evaluation of its capabilities, contextualizing them in the organizational environment in which they will be used. In this paper we present a methodology to guide the systematic evaluation of BPMS that takes into account the specific needs of each organization. It provides a list of key characteristics of BPMS which are ranked by the organization and evaluated using test cases and quantitative criteria. We also present case studies of open source and proprietary BPMS evaluations following our proposal.

Model transformations for Business-IT alignment: from collaborative business process to SoaML service model

Modeling business process allows an organization to think about its way of conducting business while helping discover weakness in its processes. Although it is common for participants to collaborate within an organization, it is essential to define how different participants from different organizations collaborate as a community, to reach a common business goal. In this context, the realization of business processes by means of services becomes more important, providing support for separating their definition from the technologies implementing them, allowing a better response to changes. A model-driven approach for the direct generation of services from business processes provides several advantages such as reuse of the knowledge imbibed in the correspondences defined between the involved metamodels and traceability between elements in both metamodels, allowing for a better Business-IT alignment. In this article we present an approach for the automatic generation of SoaML service-oriented models from collaborative business process models in BPMN2.

Main Principles on the Integration of SOC and MDD Paradigms to Business Processes: A Systematic Review

Over the last few years organizations have been dealing with the integration of their business processes and software and technologies to support their realization. One challenge is to unite the vision from business and software areas, to design and implement business processes in a way that allows organizations to react agilely to changes. New paradigms have appeared to support this vision: Business Process Management (BPM), Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). BPM deals with managing business process lifecycle from modeling, implementation, execution and evaluation to find improvement opportunities. SOC bases the design and implementation of software on services, which are defined to support business processes. MDD focus is on models, allowing the definition of automatic transformation between them along with code generation for different platforms. In this article we present the main principles for the integration of these paradigms as found in a systematic review carried out with the objective of establishing the bases for our research.

Towards the construction of quality-aware Web Warehouses with BPMN 2.0 Business Processes

A Web Warehouse (WW) is a Data Warehouse which consolidates data from the Web. The goal of these systems is to act as an intermediary between data publication and the user, pre-processing data and adding value to them. This pre-processing involves data integration, data aggregation, data re-structuring and data quality measurement and improvement. A Business Process (BP) model helps us to specify the users, activities, precedence relations between activities and restrictions, that have to be carried out in order to obtain the desired output. In this paper we present a two level BP specification approach for constructing a WW which has two distinctive characteristics: it manages data quality and it is configurable. The first level BP model is focused on helping the user to configure the web data sources and the desired data quality characteristics, the second level BP uses the defined configuration to generate the WW. Quality characteristics are also defined for the intermediate data sources used to populate the WW.

Towards a Generic BPMS User Portal Definition for the Execution of Business Processes

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide support for the business process (BPs) lifecycle, from modeling to executing and evaluating BPs. Key elements provided within a BPMS are a process engine where BP models are executed and a web portal for users interaction providing means to manage a work list, taking and completing tasks, among other functionalities. Most BPMS portals provide a set of core features for users to manage their work lists, as well as service-oriented access to their process engine, which is tightly coupled. In this context it seems possible to define a generic BPMS user portal which can be integrated (loosely coupled) with potentially any process engine for the execution of business processes. In this paper we define such generic BPMS user portal based on a unified data model and a generic process engine API. We also show the feasibility of these ideas through the development of a prototype.