Dieter Van Nuffel

Enhancing the Formal Foundations of BPMN by Enterprise Ontology

Recently, business processes are receiving more attention as process-centric representations of an enterprise. This paper focuses on the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), that is becoming an industry standard. However, BPMN has some drawbacks such as the lack of formal semantics, limited potential for verification, and ambiguous description of the constructs. Also the ontology used to model is mostly kept implicit. As a result, BPMN models may be ambiguous, inconsistent or incomplete. In order to overcome these limitations, a contribution to BPMN is proposed by applying the way of thinking of DEMO; the explicit specified Enterprise ontology axioms and the rigid modeling methodology of DEMO. Adding the ontological concepts which, in DEMO, are translated into a coherent set of modeling symbols, may result in formal, unambiguous BPMN business process models. As such BPMN can be enriched on several aspects like the diagnosis, consistency, and optimalization of business processes.

Aligning the constructs of enterprise ontology and normalized systems

Literature suggests that, due to their complexity, organizations need to be designed in order to be effective and evolvable. Recently, two promising approaches have been introduced that are relevant in this regard. Enterprise Ontology creates essential models that are implementation-independent. Normalized Systems is concerned with the development of information systems with proven evolvability. In this paper, we combine both approaches. To this end, we express the transaction pattern—a central construct of Enterprise Ontology—using the constructs of Normalized Systems. By aligning these constructs, we attempt to introduce traceability between the Enterprise Ontology level and the Normalized Systems level. The resulting artefact exhibits the benefits of both Enterprise Ontology and Normalized Systems. We illustrate the application of the artefact in the context of enterprise architectures.

The Introduction of OpenOffice.org in the Brussels Public Administration

Open source software is increasingly used by public administrations as an alternative to commercial software. In this paper we present a case study of the transition of the ministerial cabinets of the Brussels-Capital Region towards OpenOffice.org. In this case, the decision to use open source software was taken by the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region. The goal of the paper is to outline the implementation trajectory followed and to compare our findings to previous studies in this field as well as other Information Systems literature. Additionally, we discuss how OpenOffice.org was received by end users as well as the IT department that was responsible for the migration. Our findings indicate that although a migration towards OpenOffice.org is feasible, a number of difficulties still remain. For example, end user perceptions of OpenOffice.org are not always favorable and migration costs (document conversion and training) can be significant.

Multi-abstraction layered business process modeling

Business Process Management (BPM) acceptance requires a modeling framework in which all abstraction layers (from the high-level enterprise view to the low-level task view) are unified and kept consistent at all times. This paper presents a simple yet effective multi-layered multi-view business process modeling framework that integrates organizational aspects, behavioral aspects, and input and output of business processes. The ultimate goal of this framework is to structure modeling efforts and to improve the usability of business process models in day-to-day decision making. A set of relationships between the layers are defined to support round-tripping as much as possible. A financial services based example is presented as a proof-of-concept in which the modeling framework was tested and assessed.

Towards a service-oriented methodology: business-driven guidelines for service identification

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are becoming the new paradigm for developing enterprise information systems. Most of the current research on SOA is focused on implementation issues. However the need of a complete SOA methodology is clearly defined within literature. This dissertation will contribute to the emerging SOA methodology by focusing on the analysis phase of a SOA project, and more specifically on the identification of services. Following a design science approach, guidelines will be created able to translate business processes into services. These guidelines will be based upon theoretical concepts derived from a number of existing theories and approaches, and will be evaluated through its application within SOA projects.

Translating Ontological Business Transactions into Evolvable Information Systems

In order to obtain enterprise agility, a number of approaches have recently been proposed to purposefully engineer enterprises. A first category aims to engineer evolvable information systems to enable the IT infrastructure to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. A second category captures an organization’s essence by engineering implementation-independent models. Although these approaches have their merits, they do not yet provide full traceability from the business to the information systems’ level. This paper proposes an approach to create a deterministic, traceable path from ontological business transactions — represented by Enterprise Ontology models — to evolvable information systems—represented by Normalized Systems theory — based on proven principles. Our results describe a set of principles that have to be obeyed to derive such a Normalized Systems Business Transaction.

Towards Applying Normalized Systems Theory Implications to Enterprise Process Reference Models

The analysis phase in the overall development life cycle of information systems has frequently proved to be a difficult assignment as the quality of the work heavily depends on the skills, experience and domain knowledge of the analyst. As a consequence, analysis patterns and reference models have been introduced in the past as a means to consolidate best-practices in conceptual modeling (often incorporating specific domain knowledge) and guiding analysts in their modeling efforts. However, the actual evaluation of reference models or analysis patterns available remains a challenging issue. Here, the evolvability or flexibility of the considered frameworks seems to be a legitimate evaluation criterion. Hence, in this paper, the well-known SAP Reference Model framework is analyzed with regard to its adherence to Normalized Systems (NS) theory design principles as this theory specifically focuses on the evolvability of modular structures such as information systems and business processes. It is concluded that it is feasible to employ the NS theory to evaluate such reference models from an evolvability point of view and distinguish both aspects and indications towards conformance with NS theory, as well as indications of possible violations regarding its principles.

Engineering Business Processes: Comparing Prescriptive Guidelines from EO and NSBP

Both Enterprise Ontology and Normalized Systems can be considered as theories provide prescriptive guidelines to design systems. Enterprise Ontology explicitly focuses on the design of organizations as being social systems. Originally, Normalized Systems focused on the design of evolvable software systems. However, it has been shown that, building on the Normalized Systems design knowledge, prescriptions for other domains, such as business processes, can be proposed as well. This domain seems to overlap at least partially with the domain of Enterprise Ontology, which is used to establish claims concerning process design in various publications. However, both theories are based on completely different kernel theories. Therefore, this paper analyzes to which extent the guidelines proposed for the Normalized Systems Business Processes are consistent, complementing or conflicting with prescriptions from Enterprise Ontology. This analysis is complemented by means of a case study elaborated from both approaches. A consistent set of prescriptions could lead to a more integrated approach for designing integrated organizations, business processes and software systems.

Towards deterministically constructing organizations based on the normalized systems approach

Contemporary organizations need to be more agile to keep up with the swiftly changing business environment This means that their organizational structure, business processes and information systems should evolve at the same pace This proves to be quite a challenge due to the invasive nature of these changes and a lack of alignment between these artefacts It has therefore been argued that more determinism is needed when engineering these artefacts Recently, the normalized systems approach has been proposed to design information systems exhibiting proven evolvability In this paper, we extend the approachs basic principles to the related fields of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Management (BPM) This study is part of ongoing design science research to incorporate determinism in the construction of an organizations artefacts Our results show that such approach is feasible and could increase traceability from the organizational level to the information systems.

The Automatic Discovery of Violations to the Normalized Systems Design Theorems: A Feasibility Study

Evolvability is an important concern for the design and development of information systems. Recently, the Normalized Systems theory has been proposed, which aims to ensure the high evolvability of information systems. The Normalized Systems theory is based on the systems theoretic concept of stability and proposes four design theorems that act as constraints on the modular structure of software. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of building a tool that is able to automatically identify violations to these Normalized Systems design theorems in the source code of applications. We describe how a prototype of such a tool was developed and discuss the lessons that can be learned for its further development. Our results show that it is indeed feasible to automatically identify some violations to the Normalized Systems design theorems, although a manual inspection should still provide more insight into the issues identified in the analysis.