Fenno F. Terry Heath

Business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles: managing artifact interactions with conditions and events

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business artifacts, a.k.a. business entities (with lifecycles). These are key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. An artifact type includes both an information model that captures all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business. Two recent papers have introduced and studied the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for artifact lifecycles. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants studied in most previous work, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single artifact instance. This paper presents the formal operational semantics of GSM, with an emphasis on how interaction between artifact instances is supported. Such interactions are supported both through testing of conditions against the artifact instances, and through events stemming from changes in artifact instances. Building on a previous result for the single artifact instance case, a key result here shows the equivalence of three different formulations of the GSM semantics for artifact instance interaction. One formulation is based on incremental application of ECA-like rules, one is based on two mathematical properties, and one is based on the use of first-order logic formulas.

Introducing the guard-stage-milestone approach for specifying business entity lifecycles

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business entities with lifecycles (BELs) (a.k.a. business artifacts), i.e., key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. A BEL type includes both an information model that captures, in either materialized or virtual form, all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business by responding to events and invoking services, including human activities. Most previous work on BELs has focused on the use of lifecycle models based on variants of finite state machines. This paper introduces the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for lifecycles, which is an evolution of the previous work on BELs. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single entity instance. The GSM operational semantics are based on a form of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules, and provide a basis for formal verification and reasoning. This paper provides an informal, preliminary introduction to the GSM approach, and briefly overviews selected research directions.

Siena: From PowerPoint to Web App in 5 Minutes

Siena lets users design web applications using commonly available PowerPoint as the modeling/development tool. From PowerPoint, users can model business artifacts and processes, transform applications to a standard representation and then immediately deploy and execute these composite applications on a model execution engine.

Barcelona: A Design and Runtime Environment for Declarative Artifact-Centric BPM

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business artifacts, a.k.a. business entities with lifecycles [8, 6]. These are key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. A business artifact type is modeled using a an information model, which is intended to hold all business-relevant data about entities of this type, and b a lifecycle model, which is intended to hold the possible ways that an entity of this type might progress through the business. In 2010 a declarative style of business artifact lifecycles, called Guard-Stage-Milestone GSM, was introduced [4, 5]. GSM has since been adopted [7] to form the conceptual basis of the OMG Case Management Model and Notation CMMN standard [1]. The Barcelona component of the recently open-sourced [2] ArtiFact system supports both design-time and run-time environments for GSM. Both of these will be illustrated in the proposed demo.

A Generic Business Artifacts Based Authorization Framework for Cross-Enterprise Collaboration

Business artifacts provide an approach to Business Process Management that combines data and process in a holistic way. Previous research introduced artifact-centric Interoperation Hubs (I-Hubs) as a data-centric alternative to conventional service orchestration for enabling the cooperative interaction of multiple organizations with shared business objectives. The current paper extends this vision by describing an approach for implementing I-Hubs that supports rich access control mechanisms. This reflects the data-process duality of business artifacts, the approach borrows from access control disciplines for both data and process. The paper describes how the approach is being applied in connection with two models for artifact lifecycles, a procedural one based on finite state machines and a declarative one based on guards, stages, and milestones.

Towards a Shared Ledger Business Collaboration Language Based on Data-Aware Processes

Shared ledger technologies, as exemplified by Blockchain, provide a new framework for supporting business collaborations that is based on having a high-reliability, shared, trusted, privacy-preserving, nonrepudiable data repository that includes programmable logic in the form of “smart contracts”. The framework has the potential to dramatically transform business collaboration across numerous industry sectors, including finance, supply chain, food production, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare. Widespread adoption of this technology will be accelerated by the development of business-level languages for specifying smart contracts. This paper proposes that data-aware business processes, and in particular the Business Artifact paradigm, can provide a robust basis for a shared ledger Business Collaboration Language (BCL). The fundamental rationale for adopting data-aware processes is that shared ledgers focus on both data and process in equal measure. The paper examines potential advantages of the artifact-based approach from two perspectives: conceptual modeling, and opportunities for formal reasoning (verification). Broad research challenges for the development, understanding, and usage of a shared ledger BCL are highlighted.

Towards a Plug-and-Play B2B Marketing Tool Based on Time-Sensitive Information Extraction

The LARIAT system developed at IBM Research uses information extraction applied to news feeds and other time-sensitive documents, along with historical and enterprise data, to provide a stream for B2B sales leads to different sales teams. This paper overviews the system and discusses lessons learned. LARIAT is contrasted with the IBM infoSage system from almost two decades ago. The experience with LARIAT is used as the basis for the design of a Solution-as-a-Service framework that will enable a richly extensible version of the capability, which could serve multiple B2B companies while affording economies of scale.

Analytics Process Management: A New Challenge for the BPM Community

Today, essentially all industry sectors are developing and applying “big data analytics” to gain new business insights and new operational efficiencies. Essentially two forms of analytics processing support these business-targeted applications: (i) “analytics explorations” that search for business-relevant insights in support of description, prediction, and prescription; and (ii) “analytics flows” that are deployed and executed repeatedly to apply such insights to support reporting and enhance existing business processes. The human environment that surrounds business-targeted analytics involves a multitude of stake-holder roles, and a number of distinct processes are required for the development, deployment, maintanence, and governance of these analytics. This short paper presents preliminary work on a framework for Analytics Process Management (APM), a new branch of Business Process Management (BPM) that is intended to address the central challenges managing analytics flows at scale. APM is focused on the processes that manage the overall lifecycle of analytics flows and their executions, and their integration into “operational” business processes that have been the traditional domain of BPM. The paper identifies key meta-data that should be maintained for analytics flows and their executions, and identifies the core business processes that are needed to create, apply, compare, and maintain such flows. The paper also raises key research questions that need to be addressed in the emerging area of APM.

IBM system G Social Media Solution: Analyze multimedia content, people, and network dynamics in context

We present IBM System G Social Media Solution, which includes a suite of applications designed for in-context monitoring, exploration, and analysis of social multimedia content as well as related people and network dynamics. Each individual application focuses on a unique aspect of social media data analysis in relevant context; collectively, they provide a comprehensive set of tools for exploring and analyzing real-time and historical social media data at large scale. The solution is empowered by a unified data management platform, based on a property graph model, to efficiently handle a large variety of social media applications.

Applying Case Management Principles to Support Analytics Process Management

Analytics Process Management (APM) is an emerging branch of Business Process Management that is focused on supporting Business Analysts and others as they apply analytics approaches, algorithms, and outputs in order to discover and/or repeatedly produce business-relevant insights and apply them into on-going business operations. While APM is now occurring in many businesses, it is typically managed in ad hoc ways using a variety of different tools and practices. This paper proposes to use principles from Case Management (or equivalently, Business Artifacts) to provide a foundational structure for APM. In particular, six key classes of Case Types are identified, that can model the vast majority of activities and data being manipulated in APM contexts. These Case Types can simplify support for managing provenance, auditability, repeatability, and explanation of analytics results. The paper also identifies two key adaptations of the classical Case Management paradigm that are needed to support APM. The paper validates the proposed Case Types and adaptations by examining two recent systems built at IBM Research that support Business Analysists in the use of analytics tools.