Petia Wohed

On the suitability of BPMN for business process modelling

In this paper we examine the suitability of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business process modelling, using the Workflow Patterns as an evaluation framework. The Workflow Patterns are a collection of patterns developed for assessing control-flow, data and resource capabilities in the area of Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs). In doing so, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of BPMN, and its strengths and weaknesses when utilised for business process modelling. The analysis provided for BPMN is part of a larger effort aiming at an unbiased and vendor-independent survey of the suitability and the expressive power of some mainstream process modelling languages. It is a sequel to previous work in which languages including BPEL and UML Activity Diagrams were evaluated.

Analysis of Web Services Composition Languages: The Case of BPEL4WS

Web services composition is an emerging paradigm for application integration within and across organizational boundaries. A landscape of languages and techniques for web services composition has emerged and is continuously being enriched with new proposals from different vendors and coalitions. However, little effort has been dedicated to systematically evaluate the capabilities and limitations of these languages and techniques. The work reported in this paper is a step in this direction. It presents an in-depth analysis of the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) with respect to a framework composed of workflow and communication patterns.

Managing Process Model Complexity via Concrete Syntax Modifications

While Business Process Management (BPM) is an established discipline, the increased adoption of BPM technology in recent years has introduced new challenges. One challenge concerns dealing with the ever-growing complexity of business process models. Mechanisms for dealing with this complexity can be classified into two categories: 1) those that are solely concerned with the visual representation of the model and 2) those that change its inner structure. While significant attention is paid to the latter category in the BPM literature, this paper focuses on the former category. It presents a collection of patterns that generalize and conceptualize various existing mechanisms to change the visual representation of a process model. Next, it provides a detailed analysis of the degree of support for these patterns in a number of state-of-the-art languages and tools. This paper concludes with the results of a usability evaluation of the patterns conducted with BPM practitioners.

Managing Process Model Complexity Via Abstract Syntax Modifications

As a result of the growing adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) technology, different stakeholders need to understand and agree upon the process models that are used to configure BPM systems. However, BPM users have problems dealing with the complexity of such models. Therefore, the challenge is to improve the comprehension of process models. While a substantial amount of literature is devoted to this topic, there is no overview of the various mechanisms that exist to deal with managing complexity in (large) process models. As a result, it is hard to obtain an insight into the degree of support offered for complexity reducing mechanisms by state-of-the-art languages and tools. This paper focuses on complexity reduction mechanisms that affect the abstract syntax of a process model, i.e., the formal structure of process model elements and their interrelationships. These mechanisms are captured as patterns so that they can be described in their most general form, in a language- and tool-independent manner. The paper concludes with a comparative overview of the degree of support for these patterns offered by state-of-the-art languages and tools, and with an evaluation of the patterns from a usability perspective, as perceived by BPM practitioners.

Life after BPEL

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has emerged as a standard for specifying and executing processes. It is supported by vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and positioned as the “process language of the Internet”. This paper provides a critical analysis of BPEL based on the so-called workflow patterns. It also discusses the need for languages like BPEL. Finally, the paper addresses several challenges not directly addressed by BPEL but highly relevant to the support of web services.

Patterns-based evaluation of open source BPM systems: The cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

In keeping with the proliferation of free software development initiatives and the increased interest in the business process management domain, many open source workflow and business process management systems have appeared during the last few years and are now under active development. This upsurge gives rise to two important questions: What are the capabilities of these systems? and How do they compare to each other and to their closed source counterparts? In other words: What is the state-of-the-art in the area?. To gain an insight into these questions, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of three of the major open source workflow management systems - jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark, the results of which are reported here. This analysis is based on the workflow patterns framework and provides a continuation of the series of evaluations performed using the same framework on closed source systems, business process modelling languages, and web-service composition standards. The results from evaluations of the three open source systems are compared with each other and also with the results from evaluations of three representative closed source systems: Staffware, WebSphere MQ, and Oracle BPEL PM. The overall conclusion is that open source systems are targeted more toward developers rather than business analysts. They generally provide less support for the patterns than closed source systems, particularly with respect to the resource perspective, i.e. the various ways in which work is distributed amongst business users and managed through to completion.

Process Models and Business Models – A Unified Framework

In e-Commerce, there are two fundamental types of models, business models and process models. A business model is concerned with value exchanges among business partners, while a process model focuses on operational and procedural aspects of business communication. Thus, a business model defines the what in an e-Commerce system, while a process model defines the how. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the contents of business models and process models and to show how they can be integrated. We are using ebXML as a conceptual and notational framework for our approach. The theoretical foundations of our approach are based on the Language/Action approach and REA. We illustrate how our approach can be used to facilitate integration, process specification and process pattern interpretation.

Business Process Management with Social Software Systems – A New Paradigm for Work Organisation

Business process management systems are systems aimed to support the management of business processes in organizations. In recent years social software has emerged as an alternative approach for production and work management. In this paper, we contrast the two, identify and analyse similarities and differences, and propose a set of guidelines suggesting how they can be used in complementary ways to support work in organizations.

Anchor modeling - Agile information modeling in evolving data environments

Maintaining and evolving data warehouses is a complex, error prone, and time consuming activity. The main reason for this state of affairs is that the environment of a data warehouse is in constant change, while the warehouse itself needs to provide a stable and consistent interface to information spanning extended periods of time. In this article, we propose an agile information modeling technique, called Anchor Modeling, that offers non-destructive extensibility mechanisms, thereby enabling robust and flexible management of changes. A key benefit of Anchor Modeling is that changes in a data warehouse environment only require extensions, not modifications, to the data warehouse. Such changes, therefore, do not require immediate modifications of existing applications, since all previous versions of the database schema are available as subsets of the current schema. Anchor Modeling decouples the evolution and application of a database, which when building a data warehouse enables shrinking of the initial project scope. While data models were previously made to capture every facet of a domain in a single phase of development, in Anchor Modeling fragments can be iteratively modeled and applied. We provide a formal and technology independent definition of anchor models and show how anchor models can be realized as relational databases together with examples of schema evolution. We also investigate performance through a number of lab experiments, which indicate that under certain conditions anchor databases perform substantially better than databases constructed using traditional modeling techniques.

Conceptual Patterns for Reuse in Information Systems Analysis

Reuse of already existing resources and solutions has always been a strategy for reducing the costs in the information systems development process. Construction and organization of small pieces of reusable solutions, also called patterns, in libraries for reuse support, has taken a central place within research during the last years. In this paper, a methodology for collecting conceptual patterns and a navigation structure for suggesting the most suitable one during the information systems analysis process are suggested. The study has, so far, been carried out on one domain only, but it provides a theoretical background for research on other domains as well.