News and Events
As member of the program committee of IADIS conference on “ICT, Society and Human Beings” (part of IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2008 (MCCSIS 2008) I invite my colleagues in case that they might have an interest in some of the topics or subtopics to contribute with a paper. For more information about this conference including the conference topics and the deadline for the papers submission please access the following web page: http://www.ict-conf.org/
Business Process Reengineering, Business Process Management, Workflow Management Systems and Process Aware Information Systems are a few concepts circulating around during the last decade and denoting a special kind of information systems or activities relevant for their development and utilization. These concepts address the intersection of the Information Systems and Business Management areas. As in any young discipline, this area suffers from a terminological blur, i.e. different people define the concepts above differently and sometimes the definitions are overlapping. Therefore, we start with a brief overview of the concepts we have adopted.
Terminology
During mid 90 the ideas of Business Process Rengineering (BPR) from the U.S. gained increased attention. BPR denoted an organized effort of a company to streamline its processes. It was defined by Hammer and Champy [2]
“… the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.”
BPR can be carried out at organizational level only. However, as most companies today are dependent on IT-systems that also influence the way of working, a BPR effort usually result in new needs and requirements put on the underlying IT support. If satisfied, these needs can significantly increase the benefit of the undergone business reengineering. One of the main critiques towards BPR regards its focus on a major solitary change, which can not sufficiently capture the continuous dynamics and evolution of an enterprise. As a result of this, in late 90s and early 00s the attention shifted from BPR to Business Process Management (BPM). Business Process Management includes, according to Weske [4],
“.. concepts, methods, and techniques to support the design, administration, configuration, enactment, and analysis of business processes.”
A Business Process is the ordering of a set of activities in an organization for achieving certain goals. A case is a specific instantiation of a business process. The administration of cases, hence business process execution, can be supported through software systems. A system specifically developed for this purposed is called a workflow management system (WFMS). A Workflow is defined by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) as the
“.. automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for actions according to a set of procedural rules” [5]
Because of present confusion between the terms (business) process and workflow, we will refer to a workflow as the technical implementation of a (business) process in a Workflow Management System. Workflow models, which are usually graphical, are used to specify the process under consideration. A Workflow Management System (WFMS) is a system which can read, interpret, and execute processes by scheduling and distributing work to different agents according to workflow models. More precisely a WFMS is according to the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC):
“A System that defines, creates and manages the execution of workflow through the use of software, running on one or more workflow engine, which is able to interpret the process definition, interact with workflow participants and, where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications.” [5]
Figure 1 below shows the Workflow Reference Model by WfMC, defined approximately ten years ago. During these ten years also the term Business Process Management Suits (BPMS) has appeared and been adopted by some of the former WFMS vendors who now market their products as BPMS. Some (e.g. Gartner) claims that BPMS adds to the WFMS (which traditionally were build to support the document routing) the aspect of system connectivity. Indeed, while the development WFMS started thirty years ago as document routing systems, they have grown to exactly workflow management (and not document management) systems (which can also be seen from the ten years old Workflow Reference Model in Figure 1). We consider therefore the term BPMS as just a modern denotation for the traditional WFMS, simply aligned with the BPM trend terminology.
Fig 1 The Workflow Reference Model by WfMC
Recently, in 2005 the term process aware information system was coined. A Process Aware Information Systems (PAIS) is a
“software system that manages and executes the operational processes involving people, application, and/or information sources on the basis of process models” [1].
PAIS incorporates a wider spectrum of tools including WFMS, Case Handling Systems, Groupware (such as project management tools and process-aware collaboration tools), process/services composition etc. The lifecycle of a PAIS is depicted in Figure 2. Interesting to note is that in addition to the WFMS there is a category of tools focusing exclusively on supporting the business process analysis and modeling phase.
Fig 2 The PAIS life cycle (copied from [1])
Languages and Systems
As apparent from the previous section the area of BPM and Workflow system has been developing rapidly during the last decade. New business process modeling and implementation notations have been established and join the existing ones in continues development. Figure 3 chart the mainstream languages in the area. The obvious question is how these languages, which are created with the same purpose, i.e. business process modeling, compare to each other.
Since 2002, in cooperation with A/Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede, BPM Group, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Prof. Wil van der Aalst, BPM Center, Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE) and QUT, we have been working on a number of deep analyses and comparisons of BPM languages. The method of work has been to study the languages through one same evaluation framework, The Workflow Patterns framework, developed at QUT, was used for this purpose. The framework was developed through a bottom-up analysis of more than 15 WFMS, during which a number of patterns were extracted and systemized into three categories: control-flow, data, and resource patterns.
Fig 3 Business process modeling languages (copied from [3])
The green shading in Figure 3 show the languages in which analyses we have been participated. (The results are listed below.) The blue shading show the analyses performed by our partners. The red shading show an analysis (with the same workflow patterns framework) performed by other researchers.
Recently, our work was extended to with the workflow patterns framework analyse some mainstream workflow management systems. The suitability of the following open-source offerings for BPM was studied:
Preliminary results from this work are reported here. The report is currently under review by the vendors.
References
[1] M. Dumas, W.M.P van der Aalst and A. ter Hofstede, Process Aware Information Systems: Bridging People and Software through Process Technology, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2005
[2] M. Hammer and J. Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper Business, 1993
[3] 5. M. Josuttis, SOA in Practice, OReilly, 2007
[4] M. Weske, Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architerctures, Springer, 2007
[5] The Workflow Management Coalition, “Terminology and Glossary”, WFMC-TC-1011, http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/TC-1011_term_glossary_v3.pdf, 1999.
In December 2007 we established a contact with Tibco, Sweden.
On 3rd of December, we had a meeting with:
Mark Rattley - Vice President UKI, Nordics & MEA Region,
Jan Hygstedt - Country Manager Nordics, and
Mårten Nilsson - Solution Architect;
all representatives from Tibco. From DSV Prof. Paul Johannesson, Birger Anderson, Michael Persson and myself attended the meeting. I gave a brief presentation of DSV and Paul introduced Syslab. Mark introduced the company and gave an overview of Tibco’s University Relations Program.
I contacted Tibco, because I am interested in investigating their workflow management system called iProcess Suite for teaching purposes. After the meeting I was invited to join two courses on the product: BPM200 Essentials of TIBCO BPM 10.x and BPM205 Designing with the TIBCO iProcess tm Modeler 10.x., which I did during week 50. Bram van Tol, from the Netherlands, was course leader. He provided a high quality training on the tool. I would like to thank Mark, Jan and Mårten for providing me with the opportunity to join the course. I am looking forward to a continued co-operation.
The work on patterns-based evaluation of three major open source workflow management systems was finalized in December 2007. The evaluated systems are:
All three systems are written in Java. Paul Harmon outlines them, in his article from 31st of July 2007, as the most often mentioned systems he has come across. We selected them for our evaluation because they are regularly updated and their web sites provide an indication of an active and sizeable user community. jBPM is part of JBoss (a commercial company), Enhydra Shark supports XPDL (the standard proposed by the WfMC) and OpenWFE is an active project on Sourceforge, labelled as “Production/Stable”, and having more than 100,000 downloads.
The workflow patterns were used as evaluation framework.
The work was conducted in cooperation with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The results are presented in a technical report (draft version) which is co-authored by myself, Birger Andersson (from Syslab, SU/KTH), Arthur ter Hofstede (QUT), Nick Russell (TUE), and Wil van der Aalst (TUE). The report was sent for review to the developers of the three systems. It is also published on the BPM Center and on the workflow patterns web sites.
Due to some of the authors’ close involvement, the YAWL system was not considered in this evaluation.
Last week of November 2007, I visited Nick Russell and Prof. Wil van der Aalst at Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE), in The Netherlands.
During my visit we worked on summarising the results from our work on patterns-based evaluation of open source systems and presenting them in a paper, which we submitted to the CAiSE 2008 conference.
I also used the opportunity to meet Sybrand Jongejans from COSA. COSA GmbH is a companly initiated in 1979 in Germeny and now well established in the Netherlands. Their product, COSA-BPM is a workflow management system, which I am interested in to investigate for teaching purposes. Sybrand Jongejans provided me kindly with a free licence of the product.
Hans Weigand from Tilburg University visited us at SYSLAB 17 – 20 Dec 2007. We continued our previous work on value and business modelling. In particular, we discussed how service models could be based on value models. We also discussed how value activities should be modelled, in particular the issue that a value activity may use and contribute to the same resource, e.g. knowledge.
The figure shows, from left, Birger Andersson, Hans Weigand, Paul Johannesson, Ananda Edirisuriya, and Tharaka Ilayperuma.
Hans Weigand Homepage
Service engineering is an approach to the study, design and implementation of service systems in which specific constellations of organizations and technologies provide value for others in the form of electronic services.
Key to this approach is the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), a model that utilizes services as the basic computing unit to support development and composition of larger-granularity services in heterogeneous environments, which can in turn, support flexible business processes and applications that span organizations.
SOC heavily relies on the use of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), a logical way of designing a software system to provide services to either end-user applications or to other services distributed in a network, via published and discoverable interfaces. In the scope of SOA, services are autonomous computational entities that can be used in a platform independent way. Services can be described, published, discovered, and dynamically assembled.
SOA, built with Web services is gaining increasing use in electronic-based business interactions. Web services employ common Internet technologies enabling thus standards-based, infrastructure to be used.
So far, research and development of Web services has mainly focused on an operational perspective, such as the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. However, more important is the fact that Web services are used to expose valuable business functionality. In the long-run, Web services that do not support certain business values cannot be motivated. This fact is shifting lately the focus to large scale design of external e-services, within the context of economic value exchanges to the business level. These, high-level business services are further implemented using basic functions composed in the form of Web services in processes. Apprehending this as a core relation between high-level, business-centered services and low-level, technology-centered services, it becomes natural to develop systems from a higher level of abstraction, and leave particular technologies to handle tedious details of the low-level services.
Besides the need to handle the increased complexity in the form of numerous business actors and their value exchanges, there is also a need for a structured approach for software service design that merges the IT and business perspectives. A well-defined alignment of software and business values provides benefits for service requirement gathering, service design and service validation.
Current SYSLAB research within the area of the service engineering is focused on the identification and design of goal- and business-aligned e-services.
DSV is represented by Hercules Dalianis in the Road Show delegation with 60 professors from Stockholm University and 14 other Swedish universities travelling to Beijing and Shanghai in China to recruit master students, and to show Swedish research in a lot of areas.
We have been visiting education fairs, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Ministry of Education, Peking University, Renmin University, Bei Hang University all in Beijing. The students are enthusiastic and are eager to start master studies and even PhD studies. Now we have arrived in Shanghai and continue with meeting with Jiatong university, Fudan university and Tongji university.
Find more photos like this on .
Read more in Swedish: RoadshowKina18-29okt2007_Hercules.pdfDSV is represented by Hercules Dalianis in the Road Show delegation with 60 professors from Stockholm University and 14 other Swedish universities travelling to Beijing and Shanghai in China to recruit master students, and to show Swedish research in a lot of areas.
We have been visiting education fairs, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Ministry of Education, Peking University, Renmin University, Bei Hang University all in Beijing. The students are enthusiastic and are eager to start master studies and even PhD studies. Now we have arrived in Shanghai and continue with meeting with Jiatong university, Fudan university and Tongji university.
Download RoadshowKina18-29okt2007_Hercules.pdf
Find more photos like this on .DSV is represented by Hercules Dalianis in the Road Show delegation with 60 professors from Stockholm University and 14 other Swedish universities travelling to Beijing and Shanghai in China to recruit master students, and to show Swedish research in a lot of areas.
We have been visiting education fairs, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Ministry of Education, Peking University, Renmin University, Bei Hang University all in Beijing. The students are enthusiastic and are eager to start master studies and even PhD studies. Now we have arrived in Shanghai and continue with meeting with Jiatong university, Fudan university and Tongji university.
Download RoadshowKina18-29okt2007_Hercules.pdf