Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling

The improvement of business processes has recently emerged as one of the top business priorities for IT, and Business Process Management (BPM) is currently being seen as the best way to deliver process improvements. This research explores the enablers of BPM success, expanding on the Rosemann, de Bruin and Power theoretical BPM success model [1]. Qualitative research was conducted in four South African Financial Services Organisations with developing BPM capability. The research identified multiple success enablers categorised around Strategy, Culture, People / Resources, Governance, Methods and IT. Correlation between these factors was proposed and BPM, process and business success defined. Poor understanding of BPM within the participating organisations was found as well as insufficient supporting IT resources. It was found that the benefits of BPM investment had not yet been realised, which, increased the threat of funding being withdrawn.

This paper addresses the problem of managing business process change at the level of design-time artifacts, such as BPMN process models. Our approach relies on a sophisticated scheme for annotating BPMN models with functional effects as well as non-functional properties. This permits us to assess the extent of change being made, as well as the performance characteristics of the resulting processes.

When business processes are affected by changes in legal or organisational requirements, the corresponding process models have to be adapted accordingly. These requirements implicate constraints that influence how certain parts of business processes have to be modelled. If these constraints are not explicitly known to the modelling tool, the chance that a modeller accidentally violates them increases with the number of constraints. Therefore, we propose to explicitly model constraints and automatically verify them in order to support change. In this paper, we explain how to incorporate semantics into business process models and constraints in order to facilitate the verification process. In addition, we present ideas on how to model and verify these constraints.

While traditional approaches in business process modelling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioural description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in

goal-oriented business process modelling

[23][24][6], the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to the business processes. One of the difficulties in enabling

goal-oriented business process modelling

is the identification of goals. This paper reports on a study conducted in an organization in which we have obtained several goal models which were represented in Tropos methodology, each one corresponding to a business process also modelled in the scope of the study. A preliminary goal elicitation activity has been carried out for collecting an initial version of the goal models. After that, we have obtained a second version of the goal models by using the NFR catalogues as a tool in goal elicitation. We have found the NFR catalogues to be useful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not arise during previous interviews.

Business intelligence (BI) is becoming a key means of providing information necessary for achieving business goals such as improving profits or solving business process issues. This paper proposes a business process-IT alignment method for BI. The proposed method has two phases of business processes: the first phase extracts and checks the validity of hypotheses for achieving business goals and the second phase clarifies the actions needed to implement the hypotheses. Then, business information used in each business process is defined. Four levels of BI systems are proposed in accordance with the maturity of the enterprises they support, and each level is mapped to a subset of the business processes. Finally, three types of models used to clarify and organize the hypotheses and the actions are proposed. Case studies have shown that the method explains a variety of business processes for BI and BI systems.

Evaluating the complexity of business processes during the early stages of their development, primarily during the process modelling phase, provides organizations and stakeholders with process models which are easier to understand and easier to maintain. This presents advantages when carrying out evolution tasks in process models – key activities, given the current competitive market. In this work, we present the use and validation of the CFC metric to evaluate the complexity of business processes modelled with BPMN. The complexity of processes is evaluated from a control-flow perspective. An empirical evaluation has been carried out in order to demonstrate that the CFC metric can be useful when applied to BPMN models, providing information about their ease of maintenance.

There is a wide variety of drivers for business process modelling initiatives, reaching from business evolution and process optimisation over compliance checking and process certification to process enactment. That, in turn, results in models that differ in content due to serving different purposes. In particular, processes are modelled on different abstraction levels and assume different perspectives. Vertical alignment of process models aims at handling these deviations. While the advantages of such an alignment for inter-model analysis and change propagation are out of question, a number of challenges has still to be addressed. In this paper, we discuss three main challenges for vertical alignment in detail. Against this background, the potential application of techniques from the field of process integration is critically assessed. Based thereon, we identify specific research questions that guide the design of a framework for model alignment.

Just like web services, business processes can be stored in public repositories to be shared and used by third parties, e.g., as building blocks for constructing new business processes. The success of such a paradigm depends partly on the availability of effective search tools to locate business processes that are relevant to the user purposes. A handful of researchers have investigated the problem of business process discovery using as input syntactical and structural information that describes business processes. In this work, we explore an additional source of information encoded in the form of annotations that semantically describe business processes. Specifically, we show how business processes can be semantically described using the so called

abstract business processes

. These are designated by concepts from an ontology which additionally captures their relationships. We show how this ontology can be built in an automatic fashion from a collection of (concrete) business processes, and we illustrate how it can be refined by domain experts and used in the discovery of business processes, with the purpose of reuse and increase in design productivity.

Various approaches for services development in SOA propose business processes as a starting point. However, there is a lack of systematic methods for services identification during business analysis. We believe that there has to exist a integrated view of organizational business processes to promote an effective SOA approach, which will improve IS requirements understanding. In this context, we propose a method, and a detailed set of activities, for guiding the service designer in identifying the most appropriate set of services to support organization business activities. The method was applied in a real scenario of a Brazilian Petroleum organization.

Besides goals and regulations, IT is also considered as a driver for business process development or evolution. However, as reuse becomes increasingly important in many organizations due to return of investment considerations, the available IT is not only an enabler but also a constraint for business process design. In this paper, we present a systematic approach that explicitly takes into account the capabilities of a (service-oriented) reuse infrastructure and that guides the business process design accordingly. An important element in our approach is the notion of conceptual services, which we have experienced as appropriate candidates for communicating the capabilities of a reuse infrastructure to business people.

Service selection involves the use of well-defined criteria such as Quality of Service (QoS) metrics to optimally select services for business processes. However in some cases, the service capabilities being accessed require non-trivial protocols for accessing them. When the protocol of a selected service is incompatible with the process, a lifecycle transition is triggered from operation and evaluation phase to the design phase of the process lifecycle. Such transitions can be expensive in terms of the technical and organisational resources required. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework for minimising such transitions in the process lifecycle by considering the relative protocol compatitbility between candidate services.

Business rules guide the operation of an organization, thus its documentation provides an important source of information both for developing technological solutions (information systems, databases)and for evaluating information systems implementations. Despite its importance, manual creation and maintenance of business rule documentation is very costly, and practically infeasible in complex organizations. This paper describes a method for discovering business rules from the information systems event logs, through the use of process mining and data mining techniques. We exemplify the method execution to discover two selected sub-types of business rules, namely condition action assertions and authorization action assertions.

Recently, several large companies have been involved in financial scandals related to mismanagement, resulting in financial damages for their stockholders. In response, certifications and manuals for best practices of governance were developed, and in some cases, tougher federal laws were implemented (e.g. the Sarboness Oxley Act). Companies adhered to these changes adopting the best practices for corporate governance by deploying Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs) to automate their business processes. However, these companies demand a rapid response to strategic changes, so the adoption of normative PAISs may compromise their competitiveness. On one hand companies need flexible PAISs for competitiveness reasons. On the other hand flexibility may compromise security of system because users can execute tasks that could result into violation of financial loses. In order to re-balance this trade-off, we present in this work how ProM tools can support anomaly detection in logs of PAIS. Besides, we present the results of the application of our approach with a real case.

Enterprise systems implementations are often accompanied by changes in the business processes of the organizations in which they take place. However, not all the changes are desirable. In “vanilla” implementations it is possible that the newly operational business process requires many additional steps as “workarounds” of the system limitations, and is hence performed in an inefficient manner. Such inefficiencies are reflected in the event log of the system as recurring patterns of log entries. Once identified, they can be resolved over time by modifications to the enterprise system. Addressing this situation, the paper proposes an approach for identifying inefficient workarounds by mining the related patterns in an event log. The paper characterizes such patterns, proposes a mining algorithm, and rules for prioritizing the required process improvements.

After a period of little regulation, many companies are now facing a growing number and an increasing complexity of new laws, regulations, and standards. This has a huge impact on how organizations conduct their daily business and involves various changes in organizational and governance structures, software systems and data flows as well as corporate culture, organizational power and communication. We argue that the implementation of a holistic compliance cannot be divided into isolated projects, but instead requires a thorough analysis of relevant components as well as an integrated design of the very same. This paper examines the state-of-the-art of compliance research in the field of information systems (IS) by means of a comprehensive literature analysis. For the systemization of our results we apply a holistic framework for enterprise analysis and design. The framework allows us to both point out “focus areas” as well as “less travelled roads” and derive a future research agenda for compliance research.

Over the last decade there was a high interest in business process modeling in organizations. In their majority workflow systems support a role-based allocation of work to actors. This allocation does not consider the additional work which comes from the actors environment and which is not visible to the workflow management system. In fact, the WFMS is not aware of the real workload of human resources in the organization. In this paper we propose an

actor-driven approach

for business processes management which aims at taking into account the additional work generated by the environment (telephone, fax, mail, verbally) and thus the the real workload of actors.

Contemporary workflow management systems (WfMS) offer promising perspectives in respect to comprehensive lifecycle support of business processes. However, there still exist numerous business applications with hard-coded process logic. Respective application software is both complex to design and costly to maintain. One major reason for the absence of workflow technology in these applications is the fact that many processes are data-driven; i.e., progress of process instances depends on value changes of data objects. Thus business processes and business data cannot be treated independently from each other, and business process models have to be compliant with the underlying data structure. This paper presents characteristic properties of data-oriented business software, which we gathered in several case studies, and it elaborates to what degree existing WfMS are able to provide the needed object-awareness. We show that the activity-centered paradigm of existing WfMS is too inflexible in this context, and we discuss major requirements needed to enable object-awareness in processes management systems.

Business Process annotation with semantic tags taken from an ontology is becoming a crucial activity for business designers. In fact, semantic annotations help business process comprehension, documentation, analysis and evolution. However, building a domain ontology and annotating a process with semantic concepts is a difficult task.

In this work, we propose an automated technique to support the business designer both in domain ontology creation/extension and in the semantic annotation of process models expressed in BPMN. We use natural language processing of the labels appearing in the process elements to construct a domain ontology skeleton or to extend an existing ontology, if available. Semantic annotations are automatically suggested to the business designer, based on a measure of similarity between ontology concepts and the labels of the process elements to be annotated.

Ontologies are commonly used in computer science either as a reference model to support semantic interoperability, or as an artifact that should be efficiently represented to support tractable automated reasoning. This duality poses a tradeoff between expressivity and computational tractability that should be addressed in different phases of an ontology engineering process. The inadequate choice of a modeling language, disregarding the goal of each ontology engineering phase, can lead to serious problems in the deployment of the resulting model. This article discusses these issues by making use of an industrial case study in the domain of Oil and Gas. We make explicit the differences between two different representations in this domain, and highlight a number of concepts and ideas that were implicit in an original OWL-DL model and that became explicit by applying the methodological directives underlying an ontologically well-founded modeling language.

While formal methods are focused on some particular parts of software systems, especially secure ones, graphical techniques are the most useful techniques to specify in a comprehensible way large and complex systems. In this paper we deal with the B method which is a formal method used to model systems and prove their correctness by successive refinements. Our goal is to produce graphical UML views from existing formal B specifications in order to ease their readability and then help their external validation. In fact, such views can be useful for various stakeholders in a formal development process: they are intended to support the understanding of the formal specifications by the requirements holders and the certification authorities; they can also be used by the B developers to get an alternate view on their work. In this paper, we propose an MDE framework to support the derivation of UML class and state/transition diagrams from B specifications. Our transformation process is based on a reverse-engineering technique guided by a set of structural and semantic mappings specified on a meta-level.

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is an architectural framework for information integration and tool interoperation that could facilitate system modernization. Reverse engineering techniques are crucial to extract high level views of the subject system. This paper describes a reverse engineering approach that fits with MDA. We propose to integrate different techniques that come from compiler theory, metamodeling and formal specification. We describe a process that combines static and dynamic analysis for generating MDA models. We show how MOF (Meta Object Facility) and QVT (Query, View, Transformation) metamodels can be used to drive model recovery processes. Besides, we show how metamodels and transformations can be integrated with formal specifications in an interoperable way. The reverse engineering of class diagram and state diagram at PSM level from Java code is exemplified.

Conceptual modeling traditionally focuses on a high level of abstraction. Even if geographical aspects such as location is included in several enterprise modeling frameworks [26], it is not common to have geographical aspects included in conceptual models. Cartography is the science of visualizing geographical information in maps. Traditionally the field has not included conceptual relationships and the primary focus is on a fairly low abstraction level. Both cartography and conceptual modeling have developed guidelines for obtaining high quality visualizations. SEQUAL is a quality framework developed for understanding quality in conceptual models and modeling languages. In cartography such counterparts are not common to find. An attempt to adapt SEQUAL in the context of cartographic maps has been performed, named MAPQUAL. The paper presents MAPQUAL. Differences between quality of maps and quality of conceptual models are highlighted, pointing to guidelines for combined representations which are the current focus of our work. An example of such combined use is presented indicating the usefulness of a combined framework.

Recently a great number of methods and frameworks to develop multiagent systems have appeared. It makes difficult the selection between one and another. Because of that the evaluation of multiagent system software engineering techniques is an open research topic. This paper presents an evaluation framework for analyzing and comparing methods and tools for developing multiagent systems. Furthermore, four examples of usage are presented and analyzed.

Languages for specifying information systems should not only contain a data

definition

(sub)language (DDL), i.e., a part for specifying

data structures

, but also a data

retrieval

(sub)language (DRL), i.e., a part for specifying

queries

, and a data

manipulation

(sub)language (DML), i.e., a part for specifying

transactions

.

The language ORM contains a DDL and a DRL (ConQuer), but it does not contain a sufficient DML as yet. We therefore propose an extension of ORM with a DML, for specifying transactions to be easily validated by domain experts.

We introduce the following set of standard classes of specifiable transactions: add an instance, add a query result, remove a subset, and change a subset. We also treat compound transactions in ORM.

In ORM there are usually several ways to specify something. For all transactions we therefore propose syntaxes, verbalizations, and diagrams as well. They allow for type-checking and easy validation by domain experts.

In this paper we will illustrate how the fact-oriented approach, e.g. ORM, CogNiam can be used in combination with OMG’s Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules’ (SBVR) standard. Within the field of modeling methods for information systems analysis and design, this standard can become a dominant force, when it comes to expressing initial domain requirements for an application’s ontoloy and business rules, for domain analysis as well for design.

Today’s large-scale computing systems are deployed in open, changing and unpredictable environments. To operate reliably, such systems should be able to adapt to new circumstances on their own to get them running and keep them running. Self-adaptive software system has been proposed as a good solution for this demand. However, very few techniques are available to date for systematically building such kind of system. Aiming at this requirement, this paper presents a sound approach to derive a self-adaptive software architecture model from the requirements goal model in systematic way. At the same time, we illustrate our approach by applying it to a simplified on-line shopping system.

Self-contextualizability refers to the system ability to autonomously adapt its behaviour to context in order to maintain its objectives satisfied. In this paper, we propose a modeling framework to deal with self-contextualizability at the requirements level. We use Tropos goal models to express requirements; we provide constructs to analyse and represent context at each variation point of the goal model; and we exploit the goal and context analysis to define how the system satisfies its requirements in different contexts. Tropos goal analysis provides constructs to hierarchically analyse goals and discover alternative sets of

tasks

the system can

execute

to

satisfy

goals; our framework extends Tropos goal model by considering context at its variation points, and provides constructs to hierarchically analyse context and discover alternative sets of

facts

the system has to

monitor

to

verify

a context. A self-contextualizable promotion information system scenario is used to illustrate our approach.

This paper shows typical security and consistency challenges regarding the models of the business and the IT universe of the dynamic service-, process- and rule-based environment at Credit Suisse. It presents a theoretical solution for enterprise engineering that is implementable, and fits smoothly with the daily needs and constraints of the people in the scenario. It further enables decentralized modeling based on cognitive and mathematical or logical concepts. Normative aspects of the models are analyzed by graph constraint checks, while consistency is checked and ensured by model integration and transformation. To cope with theoretical and practical necessities, the presented solution is kept sound and usable as well as extensible and scalable. All techniques are based on one theoretical framework: algebraic graph theory. Therefore, the techniques are compatible with each other.

Advantages and shortcomings of different process modeling languages are heavily debated, both in academia and industry, but little evidence is presented to support judgements. With this paper we aim to contribute to a more rigorous, theoretical discussion of the topic by drawing a link to well-established research on program comprehension. In particular, we focus on imperative and declarative techniques of modeling a process. Cognitive research has demonstrated that imperative programs deliver sequential information much better while declarative programs offer clear insight into circumstantial information. In this paper we show that in principle this argument can be transferred to respective features of process modeling languages. Our contribution is a pair of propositions that are routed in the cognitive dimensions framework. In future research, we aim to challenge these propositions by an experiment.

In current business practice, an integrated approach to business and IT is indispensable. In many enterprises, however, such an integrated view of the entire enterprise is still far from reality. To deal with these challenges, an integrated view of the enterprise is needed, enabling impact and change analysis covering all relevant aspects. This need sparked the development of the ArchiMate language. This paper is concerned with documenting some of the key design decisions and design principles underlying the ArchiMate language.

Meta models are the core of enterprise architecture, but still few methods are available for the creation of meta models tailored for specific purposes. This paper presents two approaches, one focusing on the stakeholders’ information demand of enterprise architecture and the other driven by causal analysis of enterprise system properties. The two approaches are compared and a combined best-of-breed method is proposed. The combined method has merged the strengths of both approaches, thus combining the stakeholder concerns with causality-driven analysis. Practitioners will, when employing the proposed method, achieve a relevant meta model with strong, and goal-adapted, analytic capabilities.

This research captures best practices in the business-to-business (B2B) domain as a means of competitive advantage and innovation for organizations striving to adopt B2B environments. We present a case of developing and validating a set of patterns for B2B adoption and then discuss the case in the context of a number of other cases where organizational patterns have been used to capture, document and share competitive organizational knowledge.

Enterprise Modeling (EM) is used for a wide range of purposes such as developing business strategies, business process restructuring, business process orientation and standardization, eliciting information system requirements, capturing best practices, etc. A common challenge impeding the value and impact of EM is insufficient model quality. Despite substantial attention from both researchers and commercial vendors of methods the current situation in practice with respect to the quality of models produced is not satisfactory. Many modeling projects produce bad models that are essentially useless. The objective of this paper is to introduce a format, anti-patterns, for documenting critical don’ts in EM and to demonstrate the potential of the format by using it to report a set of common and reoccurring pitfalls of real life EM projects. We use the format of anti-pattern for capturing the bad solutions to reoccurring problems and then explain what led to choosing the bad solution. The anti-patterns in this paper address three main aspects of EM – the modeling product, the modeling process, and the modeling tool support.