Ming-Chien Shan

Business process intelligence

Business Process Intelligence (BPI,) is an emerging area that is getting increasingly popularfor enterprises. The need to improve business process efficiency, to react quickly to changes and to meet regulatory compliance is among the main drivers for BPI. BPI refers to the application of Business Intelligence techniques to businessprocesses andcomprises a large range ofapplication areas spanning from process monitoring and analysis to process discovery, conformance checking, prediction and optimization. This chapter provides an introductory overview of BPI and its application areas and delivers an understanding of how to apply BPI in ones own setting. In particular it shows how process mining techniques such as process discovery and conformance checking can be used to support process modeling and process redesign. In addition, it illustrates how processes can be improved and optimized over time using analytics for explanation, prediction, optimization and what-if-analysis. Throughout the chapter a strong emphasis is given to describe tools that use these techniques to support BPI. Finally, major challenges for applying BPI in practice and future trends are discussed.

Dynamic and adaptive composition of e-services

Abstract The Web is rapidly becoming the platform through which many companies deliver services to businesses and individual customers. The number and type of on-line services increase day by day, and this trend is likely to continue at an even faster pace in the immediate future. Examples of e-services currently available include bill payment, delivery of customized news, or archiving and sharing of digital documents. E-Services are typically delivered individually. However, the e-service market creates the opportunity for providing value-added , integrated services , which are delivered by composing existing e-services. To support organizations in pursuing this business opportunity we have developed eFlow , a system that supports the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a service process engine. Composite e-services have to cope with a highly dynamic business environment in terms of services and of service providers. In addition, the increased competition forces companies to provide customized services to better satisfy the needs of every individual customer. Ideally, service process should be able to transparently adapt to changes in the environment and to the need of different customers with minimal or no user intervention. In addition, it should be possible to dynamically modify service process definitions in a simple and effective way to manage cases where user intervention is indeed required. In this paper we show how eFlow achieves these goals.

Business-oriented management of Web services

Using tools and abstractions for monitoring and controlling Web services.

Developing E-Services for Composing E-Services

The Internet is rapidly becoming the preferred mean through which companies provide services to businesses and customers. A large number of e-services, including for instance stock trading, customized newspapers, real-time traffic report, or itinerary planning, is already available on the Web, and the type and number of e-services grows on a daily basis. In order to support the development and deployment of e-services, software vendors are developing e-services frameworks and platforms, that provide a language for describing an e-service, and then allow service providers to register, advertise and securely deliver e-services to (authorized) users. A composite e-service is an e-service defined by composing other basic or composite e-services. As the e-service paradigm becomes popular and more and more applications are developed or deployed as e-services, the need and opportunity for defining composite service become manifest. This paper presents a specific type of e-service (or, rather, a meta e-service) called Composition E-Service (CES), that allows the definition, execution, management, and monitoring of composite e-services. We first describe the advantages and the functionality of such a service. Next, we present the language used for specifying the composition, also discussing why existing workflow languages are not suitable for this purpose. Finally, we present the architecture and implementation of the CES we developed to deliver the service on top of the e-services platform e-speak. An analogous architecture and implementation strategy can be followed with any other e-services platform.

Technologies for E-Services

In the traditional application model, services are tightly coupled with the processes they support. For example, whenever a server’s process changes, existing clients using that process must also be updated. However, electronic commerce is moving toward e-service based interactions, where corporate enterprises use e-services to interact with each other dynamically, and a service in one enterprise could spontaneously decide to engage a service fronted by another enterprise. We clarify here the relationship between currently developing standards such as UDDI, WSDL, and WSCL, and propose a conversation controller mechanism that leverages such standards to direct services in their conversations. We can thus treat services as pools of methods, independent of the conversations they support. Even method names can be decided on independently of the conversations. Services can spontaneously discover each other and then engage in complicated interactions without the services themselves having to explicitly support conversational logic. The dynamism and flexibility enabled by this decoupling is the essential difference between applications offered over the web and e-services.

eFlow: a platform for developing and managing composite e-services

Today, companies are using the Web to connect with their back-end systems and perform e-commerce transactions. The next chapter of the Internet story is the evolution of todays access/content focused portals into e-services hubs. While many traditional services become available on the Internet as e-services, almost all of them are single point services. In order to offer higher value, end-to-end services, it should be possible to compose, customize, and deploy e-services in a very flexible and efficient way. To support e-service delivery, we have developed a platform, called eFlow, that provides the service developer with a simple, easy to use, yet powerful mechanism for defining the composite service starting from basic services. Composite services can be preassembled or created on the fly, and can dynamically adapt to changes in the business environment, such as the introduction of new basic services. In addition, eFlow includes components that allow users to monitor, analyze, and modify a service while in execution.

Hosted Universal Composition: Models, Languages and Infrastructure in mashArt

Information integration, application integration and component-based software development have been among the most important research areas for decades. The last years have been characterized by a particular focus on web services, the very recent years by the advent of web mashups, a new and user-centric form of integration on the Web. However, while service composition approaches lack support for user interfaces, web mashups still lack well engineered development approaches and mature technological foundations. In this paper, we aim to overcome both these shortcomings and propose what we call a universal composition approach that naturally brings together data and application services with user interfaces. We propose a unified component model and a universal, event-based composition model, both able to abstract from low-level implementation details and technology specifics. Via the mashArt platform, we then provide universal composition as a service in form of an easy-to-use graphical development tool equipped with an execution environment for fast deployment and execution of composite Web applications.

Adaptive and Dynamic Service Composition in eFlow

E-Services are typically delivered point-to-point. However, the e-service environment creates the opportunity for providing value-added, integrated services, which are delivered by composing existing e-services. In order to enable organizations to pursue this business opportunity we have developed eFlow, a system that supports the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a service process engine. Composite e-services have to cope with a highly dynamic business environment in terms of services and service providers. In addition, the increased competition forces companies to provide customized services to better satisfy the needs of every individual customer. Ideally, service processes should be able to transparently adapt to changes in the environment and to the needs of different customers with minimal or no user intervention. In addition, it should be possible to dynamically modify service process definitions in a simple and effective way to manage cases where user intervention is indeed required. In this paper we show how eFlow achieves these goals.

iBOM: a platform for intelligent business operation management

As IT systems become more and more complex and as business operations become increasingly automated, there is a growing need from business managers to have better control on business operations and on how these are aligned with business goals. This paper describes iBOM, a platform for business operation management developed by HP that allows users to i) analyze operations from a business perspective and manage them based on business goals; ii) define business metrics, perform intelligent analysis on them to understand causes of undesired metric values, and predict future values; iii) optimize operations to improve business metrics. A key aspect is that all this functionality is readily available almost at the click of the mouse. The description of the work proceeds from some specific requirements to the solution developed to address them. We also show that the platform is indeed general, as demonstrated by subsequent deployment domains other than finance.

A Comprehensive and Automated Approach to Intelligent Business Processes Execution Analysis

Business process management tools have traditionally focused on supporting the modeling and automation of business processes, with the aim of enabling faster and more cost-effective process executions. As more and more processes become automated, customers become increasingly interested in managing process executions. Specifically, there is a desire for getting more visibility into process executions, to be able to quickly spot problems and areas for improvements. The idea is that, by being able to assess the process execution quality, it is possible to take actions to improve and optimize process execution, thereby leading to processes that have higher quality and lower costs. All this is possible today, but involves the execution of specialized data mining projects that typically last months, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and only provide a specialized, narrow solution whose applicability is often relatively short in time, due to the ever changing business and IT environments. Still, the need is such that companies undertake these efforts.To address these needs, this paper presents a set of concepts and architectures that lay the foundation for providing users with intelligent analysis and predictions about business process executions. For example, the tools are able to provide users with information about why the quality of a process execution is low, what will be the outcome of a certain process, or how many processes will be started next week. This information is crucial to gain visibility into the processes, understand or foresee problems and areas of optimization, and quickly identify solutions. Intelligent analysis and predictions are achieved by applying data mining techniques to process execution data. In contrast to traditional approaches, where lengthy projects, considerable efforts, and specialized skills in both business processes and data mining are needed to achieve these objectives, we aim at automating the entire data mining process lifecycle, so that intelligent functionality can be provided by the system while requiring little or no user input. The ambitious end goal of the work presented in this paper is that of laying the foundation for a framework and tool that is capable of providing analysts with key intelligence information about process execution, affecting crucial IT and business decisions, almost literally at the click of a button.