Mark H. Linehan

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.

Artifact-Based Transformation of IBM Global Financing

IBM Global Financing (IGF) is transforming its business using the Business Artifact Method, an innovative business process modeling technique that identifies key business artifacts and traces their life cycles as they are processed by the business. IGF is a complex, global business operation with many business design challenges. The Business Artifact Method is a fundamental shift in how to conceptualize, design and implement business operations. The Business Artifact Method was extended to solve the problem of designing a global standard for a complex, end-to-end process while supporting local geographic variations. Prior to employing the Business Artifact method, process decomposition, Lean and Six Sigma methods were each employed on different parts of the financing operation. Although they provided critical input to the final operational model, they proved insufficient for designing a complete, integrated, standard operation. The artifact method resulted in a business operations model that was at the right level of granularity for the problem at hand. A fully functional rapid prototype was created early in the engagement, which facilitated an improved understanding of the redesigned operations model. The resulting business operations model is being used as the basis for all aspects of business transformation in IBM Global Financing.

Core business architecture for a service-oriented enterprise

The business architecture of a service-oriented enterprise can be adequately represented through five main architectural domains: business value, structure, behavior, policy, and performance. In this paper we focus on the core business architecture, the set of essential elements in each of the five domains, and the interrelationships among these elements. The business architecture described in this paper identifies the key elements required for business reasoning and for its application to business transformation through service-oriented solutions. A business scenario involving a fictional company in the apparel business illustrates the concepts presented here.

SBVR Use Cases

Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) is a new standard from the OMG that combines aspects of ontologies and of rule systems. This paper summarizes SBVR, reviews some possible use cases for SBVR, and discusses ways that vocabularies and rules given in SBVR could relate to established ontology standards, to rules technologies, and to other IT implementation technologies. It also describes experience with an SBVR prototype that transforms a subset of SBVR rules types to several types of runtime implementations.

Ontologies and Rules in Business Models

SBVR is a new standard that defines a metamodel for business-layer vocabularies and rules. This paper summarizes SBVR features and argues that the SBVR enables definition of true ontologies. The paper also summarizes experience with a partial SBVR implementation in the context of an existing technique for modeling businesses and transforming the models into implementations. The work contributes to understanding the issues around the integration of business rules with business processes and ontologies. The paper argues that these three should be seen as peer business modeling elements with important and useful inter-relationships.

Reflections on VM/pass-through: a facility for interactive networking

VM/Pass-Through, an interactive networking facility, has gained widespread acceptance within IBM and with IBM customers. Pass-Through allows a single terminal access to many different computers, including those at distant locations. In building Pass-Through, and in observing its growing use, we have had oapnp ortunity to study the practical implications of this facility and of our approach to its design. This paper is divided into two parts. The first, an introduction to Pass-Through networking, describes features of the system, supported configurations, and use of Pass-Through within the IBM Corporation. A brief history of Pass-Throughs development is also provided. In the second part of the paper, Pass-Through is used to motivate a technical discussion of interactive network technology and virtual machine subsystems. Topics covered include appropriate use of the virtual machine environment, choice of routing strategy, and performance considerations. Although the introductory portions of the paper presume no prior knowledge of computer network or operating system technology, the subsequent technical discussions do depend on a basic understanding of these areas.

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.

Defining access control rules with conditions

The Business Entity method is a new approach for declarative Business Process Modeling. An important aspect of this method is access control rules that determine what users can access what data under what conditions. This paper describes an extension of Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) for defining these access control rules. A tool supports the creation of these data access control rules by a combination of a matrix format and conditions given in SBVR Structured English. The rules are stored according to the SBVR metamodel, and may be visualized either as individual rules or in a matrix.