Business process model repositories – Framework and survey

Abstract

Context

Large organizations often run hundreds or even thousands of different business processes. Managing such large collections of business process models is a challenging task. Software can assist in performing that task, by supporting common management functions such as storage, search and version management of models. It can also provide advanced functions that are specific for managing collections of process models, such as managing the consistency of public and private processes. Software that supports the management of large collections of business process models is called: business process model repository software.

Objective

This paper contributes to the development of business process model repositories, by analyzing the state of the art.

Method

To perform the analysis a literature survey and a comparison of existing (business process model) repository technology is performed.

Result

The results of the state of the art analysis are twofold. First, a framework for business process model repositories is presented, which consists of a management model and a reference architecture. The management model lists the functionality that can be provided and the reference architecture presents the components that provide that functionality. Second, an analysis is presented of the extent to which existing business process model repositories implement the functionality from the framework.

Conclusion

The results presented in the paper are valuable as a comprehensive overview of business process model repository functionality. In addition they form a basis for a future research agenda. We conclude that existing repositories focus on traditional functionality rather than exploiting the full potential of information management tools, thus we show that there is a strong basis for further research.

Introduction

As it becomes more common for organizations to describe their operations in terms of business processes, collections of business process models grow to contain hundreds or even thousands of business process models. For example, the SAP reference model contains over 600 business process models [20] and a collection of business process models for Dutch local government contains a similar number of business process models [24]. Managing such complex process landscapes is a difficult task. Typical issues arise, like: being able to find a particular process in a collection, managing different versions of processes and maintaining consistency when multiple people are editing the same process at the same time. In addition to that, the availability of a large collection of processes opens up new possibilities, like: extracting knowledge about the operations of the organization from the collection or re-using (best-practice) process fragments from the collection to design new processes.

As a reaction, software tools [18], [26] have been developed to help preform such tasks. These tools have been built as extensions of general database and repository systems. However, they have been specialized for storing business process models by using conceptual models, for example database schemas, that are process specific and by defining process specific interfaces. The interface could, for example, take the form of a Web service interface or an API that has operations like ‘addProcess’ and ‘searchTask’ and at which process models can be imported or exported in process specific interchange formats like EPML or PNML [43]. We refer to such repositories as Business Process (BP) Model Repositories, which we define as repositories that are structured according to a process specific conceptual model and/or that have a process specific interface. In addition to exploiting the functionality that is commonly provided by repository and database management systems [13], [47], BP Model Repositories provide functionality that is specific for repositories that contain business process models. Examples of process specific functionality include: functionality to assist with lifecycle management of business processes, functionality to help maintain consistency between the private view on business processes (which is the view that organizations have internally on their business processes) and the public view on business processes (which is the view on those parts of business processes that companies want to make visible publicly), and functionality to assist with configuration management of business processes as they are composed of (certain versions of) sub-processes and tasks.

This paper contributes to the development of BP Model Repositories, by presenting a comprehensive overview of BP Model Repository functionality and a comparison of the existing BP Model Repositories. The analysis consists of two parts. First, the paper presents a framework for BP Model Repositories that describes and structures the functionality that can be provided by such repositories. Second, the paper discusses the extent to which existing BP Model Repositories implement that functionality.

Fig. 1 shows an overview of the methodology that is used to achieve these results. The methodology consists of three parts: literature study, framework definition, and survey. In the literature study, we select the literature that will be used as a basis for developing the framework. In particular, we select seminal work in the area of general repository frameworks and existing BP Model Repositories. In the framework definition, we use a selection of the BP Model Repositories that we found in the literature to develop a comprehensive overview of existing and possible functionality of BP Model repositories, i.e., a management model. In addition, we structure the functionality into a reference architecture. In the survey, we determine to what extent existing BP Model Repositories (20 BP Model Repositories are studied, see Appendix C) support the functionality that is summarized in the framework.

This paper extends a previous paper [64], which presents the management model and the reference architecture shown in Fig. 1. The contribution with respect to previous work is the comparison of existing BP Model Repositories (Section 5). Criteria and requirements of BP Model Repositories have been analyzed before [51], [52]. This paper extends that work by presenting the framework, a detailed analysis of functionality that must be provided and a more detailed comparison of existing BP Model Repositories.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an elaboration of the methodology of the paper as discussed above. Sections 3 BP Model Repository management model, 4 BP Model Repository reference architecture present the result of the framework development step, presenting a general BP Model Repository management model, which lists the functionality that can be provided by BP Model Repositories and presenting a reference architecture for BP Model Repositories that structures the functionality that can be provided. Section 5 presents the survey, by comparing existing BP Model Repositories based on the framework. Section 6 shows related works. Section 7 presents the conclusions of this paper.