Stacy F. Hobson

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.

Data Service Portal for application integration in cloud computing

Cloud computing offers both an opportunity and a challenge to the application interoperability. In a cloud computing environment, it may be easier to integrate software applications than in the traditional enterprise computing environment, if they all run on the same cloud platform, especially, on a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform, following a common programming model. However, making multiple applications running on different computing clouds would make it more difficult to deal with multiple cloud platforms and their differences. This paper presents a novel service and data management platform called DSP (Data Service Portal) in the cloud computing environment that facilitates the integration of applications by sharing their information in a loosely coupled manner. DSP enables applications to collectively exchange data through a platform in a fine-grained access control environment. The applications can work cooperatively, through the data sharing mechanism provided by the platform playing the role of a data broker, without being aware of each others presence. An individual application can maintain its own data and run independently of the other applications in the platform. The data sharing mechanism enables the applications to offer (or subscribe to) a set of data to be consumed by (or produced by) the other applications in the platform. The platform publishes the data model along with APIs and guidelines for applications to adapt to the DSP platform and get to on-board to the platform for the subscriptions.

Towards interoperability in municipal government: a study of information sharing practices

Municipal governments rely heavily on the sharing of data between departments as a means to provide high-quality and timely service to its citizens. Common tasks such as parcel renovations require the involvement of multiple departments such as Building, Planning, Zoning, Assessment and Tax to achieve the ultimate goals. However, the software applications used to support the work of these departments are provided by independent software vendors and are not integrated with one another. Therefore, municipal employees rely heavily on manual methods for data sharing. We conducted a study of 12 municipal governments to understand their information sharing needs and practices. We focused on the interaction and information sharing within and between municipal departments. Our findings can be used to shape future research on e-government initiatives and interoperability of municipal applications.

Municipal Shared Services Cloud

In essence, governments are information-intensive service enterprises. Electronic government (e-government also known as digital government, online government, among others) is an effort to address the issues in operations, information and IT. It aims to create open and efficient interactions among many stakeholders, e.g. governments, citizens, and business enterprises. In this paper, we detail the importance of information sharing in support of citizen-based service delivery and e-government initiatives. We also describe a study of 12 New York State municipalities and their specific needs and challenges relating to service delivery. We then present our research work on the Municipal Shared Services Cloud, and describe how this technology can be used to deliver municipal government IT services more efficiently and at a lower cost while providing enhanced and customizable information sharing capabilities.

Information quality issues in municipal governments

E-government initiatives rely on information as the central resource for transparency in interactions between governments, citizens, and enterprises. The availability and quality of information is critical for the successful achievement of e-government. This paper details the findings of our study of the technology infrastructure and information sharing practices of 12 New York State local governments. We discovered a number of key information quality issues that plague local governments such as data fragmentation, redundancy, and conflict. We explain how these issues have an immediate impact on the work of the government employees and quality of service to citizens, and a longer-term impact as a barrier to e-government initiatives. Additionally, we detail factors that contribute to issues of information quality and suggest ways to address these issues and ultimately enable more efficient government.

Public Disclosure versus Private Practice: Challenges in Business Process Management (Position Paper)

This paper explores the gap between actual work practices and their articulation. Our goal is to bring this gap to the forefront as an important consideration for operational process modeling. Business process models presuppose accurate disclosure of employee work practices. However, the presence of a gap between personal practices and their public disclosure is a challenge for accurately representing the true nature of business operations. We describe a field study of the working practices of a municipal organization where we identified this gap. We then offer several underlying motivations that contribute to the existence of this disparity. These findings hold important implications for global enterprises, and for process modeling efforts in general.

Improving service coordination in municipal government with the Shared Data Manager

In this paper, we describe our work in the design and evaluation of a tool, the Shared Data Manager, to be used to enable automatic data sharing capabilities for municipal government applications. In an earlier study, we determined that municipal government employees rely heavily on manual methods for data sharing, which is time-consuming and error-prone. We describe in detail our findings from a two-week evaluation of the Shared Data Manager system with municipal employees. Overall, municipal employees found the tool to be useful for sharing data between departments and customizing data sharing access controls.

Shared Data Manager for Next-Generation IT for Municipal Governments

For the next generation IT services, we have created a cloud-based platform for delivering web-based IT services to municipal governments called the Government Data Portal (GDP). This portal, which draws up on the lessons learned from an extensive study of municipal governments and their operations, offer several features that are especially designed to address the needs of the target market. The GDP allows municipal governments to subscribe to a set of applications in a shared service computing environment. The portal employs a novel approach referred to as the Shared Data Manager (SDM) that facilitates sharing of data among GDP applications in a loosely coupled manner. The main function of the SDM is to allow the users to coordinate access to the shared data. Specifically, it controls the manner in which member applications of a subscription set access the subscribers central shared data. The GDP and the SDM were piloted with several municipal governments, validating the technology and the service operational model. This paper discusses the technical details of the design and implementation of the GDP and the SDM. Additionally, it presents results from an empirical study and discusses the implications. While this paper focuses on the IT services for municipal governments, the problems that are not unique to municipal governments, and the proposed solution is not limited to the area. Indeed, our solution can be effective and useful in the enterprise as well.