2010 International Conference on E-Business and E-Government
Lightweight Business Process Modelling Li Xie
Lai Xu, Paul de Vrieze
Department of Computer Science and Technology GuangDong Polytechnic Normal University Guangzhou, China
[email protected]
Software Systems Research Centre Bournemouth University Bournemouth,UK {laixu, pdevrieze}@acm.org
who is responsible for performing certain activities; when and where they are executed; how and why the are performed, and what business objects, and which data is manipulated [2]. Another important aspect of process models is to provide the basis for process automation, where process models intend to abstract process logic from application logic, such that the underlying business process can be automated based on the enterprise IT infrastructure. Typically, process logic is implemented and managed through a business process management system, and application logic through underlying application components. Currently, the use of existing business process modelling solutions requires a certain level of domain expertise in both business and IT, for example, mastering BPMN 1 . However, business user enablement has been identified as one of the key requirements for business process management in the future [3]. Targeted user groups and scenarios will focus on a broader user base, including non IT-savvy end users. A process modelling methodology is hence required to cater for such an extended user base. Furthermore, a technical infrastructure (new or extended) is has to be established to support the methodology. Our work aims to be a step towards the enablement of business process modelling to an end user group, and thus we propose a lightweight process modelling.
Abstract—The Internet and related technologies have created an interconnected world in which we can exchange information easily, process tasks collaboratively, and form communities among users with similar interests. This allows improved efficiency and performance. Allowing business users to model their needs is a trend of business process modelling. Based on our analysis, a lightweight process modelling approach is proposed. Further efforts are needed before we are able to easily connect existing web resources. Index Terms—lightweight business process modelling; business process modelling; process-oriented service composition.
I. I NTRODUCTION Traditionally, business process management systems (BPMSs) are close, centralised control systems which execute mission critical functionalities for organisations. As the business environment constantly changing, the ability to rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable. Collaborative business processes are increasingly driven by business agility, adaptability, and flexibility. There is increased pressure to build enterprise applications quickly in order to respond to situational needs of the business. Service-orientation allows a way of thinking of business process management (BPM) in terms of computational infrastructures, services, service-based development and outcomes of those services [1]. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is rapidly becoming a significant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as Web services, implements functionality using pre-designed building blocks. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 technologies and Web services into a service-oriented application connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. One purpose of business process modelling is to provide a way of documentation, communication, and collaboration of business needs. Such models can be required for quality purposes or compliance, with regulations to document processes explicitly. For example, a business process model contains information about what activities are composed in a process; 978-0-7695-3997-3/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICEE.2010.54
A. Related work Well established business process modelling languages like EPC or BPMN require major training efforts and thus are only accepted by certain groups of people. Our work targets the end-user enablement and introduces an intuitive and guided way for modelling business processes. One facet which this work addresses is the context awareness aspect of business process models to achieve reusability and consistency. There are already initial approaches of the consideration of contexts within business process models [4],[5], [6]. In [7], the authors concentrate on the context-relevant adjustment of configuration variants of the technical execution of business processes. The authors of [8] contemplate on the situations which affect the flow of business process models. In their work, they do not focus on structural differences and how context methods can actually change the flow of these models. Their focus is set on the formalization of these situations in the form of process contexts. However, these aspects primarily concentrate on 1 Business
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has to provide process governance. A process owner needs to be assigned to every process. The process owner is responsible for answering questions regarding the model, monitoring activities related to it, and keeping the model up-to-date in web 2.0 community based environment. Another important aspect is to provide collaborative modelling functionalities. Process models should be easily accessible and understandable for all participants. The lightweight process modelling tool should provide a proper process content repository which offers easy access to all artefacts of a business process in order to store, update, retrieve, and delete information relevant to the process. The process repository should store process artefacts with the same semantic meaning only once and in a structured manner to avoid redundancy. In addition, the repository has to be extensible with predefined interfaces to allow customized changes. The modelling tool should provide a pre-defined knowledge base containing reference models, best-practise models and further examples.
business processes within companies and they primarily focus on their context-driven flow. The facets of context awareness in this conceptual framework are influenced by the context driver idea of CCTS2 [9], [10], where context defines the environment in which a process artefact is used. Although the context-driver principle [9] has been applied to business data only, we have proven that it can be applied to business process artefacts as well. As the structure and information provided in a business process model is more complex than in business data, our solution enhances the existing principle and differentiates between the meaning of business artefacts and their relation to each other. Furthermore, our solution does not focus on any specific application of contexts and neither on any specific context setting. Our previous work [11], [12] and [13] has identified key issues of implementation and usage of lightweight business process modeling environment and highlighted enable technologies of implement such end user programming environment. One of the key issues is to supporting end-user process modelling. In this paper we discuss what lightweight process modelling is about. We first look at modelling requirement of lightweight process application in Section II. Modelling principles for lightweight business process applications are introduced in Section III. Details of process modelling related are discussed in Sections IV. Evaluation results are outline in Section V. The paper ends with a conclusive summary.
III. M ODELLING P RINCIPLES In short, our lightweight business process modelling principles can be summarized as: • Minimizing designs from scratch For many end users, it is difficult to start to create a model from scratch and is not problem to design a process model based on an existing example. A learning by examples style is common in a community environment. At same time, we also provide minimum amount of language notations to minimize the learning efforts. Highly reusable process models and templates. Pre-design process models and templates can be selected. They can also serve as a learning model or a base for end users to create a new process model. It is important to provide advance guidance during the process design phase, a sound executable can thus be created. Such modelling rules or constraints (such has which joints have to followed by some splits). As an executable business process modelling language, it provides logic information which is associated with precise semantics that can be used to automatically validate and simulate business processes. • Context-awareness The names of activities/tasks involved in a process model should be unified. The context-driver principle allows identification, storage, and representation of a business process artefact only once. A business process is instantiated depending on specific context categories (e.g., business process, industry, country, business role, etc.). Providing context information such as “country” information, a specific model can be invoked out of the same name process models during the modelling stage. For example, in different countries there is a different banking system that allows different types of payment. • Reusability We adopt eight symbols from BPMN for describing a control flow of a process. The lightweight business
II. M ODELLING R EQUIREMENTS Lightweight process modelling is a combination of techniques that seek to lower the barrier to entry for process modelling. This includes fostering a more participative style of modelling and providing a forum for the community of experts. The following technical requirements arise: • Easy access: Business user enablement demands a focus on usability. This comprises both simplicity of the approach and a low footprint of the solution (“zero install”). Ideally, users can model processes using simplified notations in a web 2.0 environment and draw on modelling best practices. • Process Wiki: Combine both structured and unstructured information and publish them as a single point of reference to the organisation. The process wiki invites the community to participate in discussions, and to provide comments or ratings in relation to process proposals. Process documents can be generated for offline reading and dissemination. The lightweight process modelling tool needs to provide an intuitive user interface. Furthermore, it has to provide advanced guidance during the modelling activities. Errors, misspelling and inconsistencies should be avoided from the beginning. The integration of different views helps to provide only relevant information to a certain user group. The solution 2 UN/CEFACT: Core components technical specification- part 8 of the ebXML framework
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process modeling language supports different process patterns and templates. Details can be found in Section IV. Process patterns, process templates, process fragments, reference models, best-practice models, and further example models are provided in association with the process modelling language. • Community principle A web-based community environment provides recommendations, ranking, commenting of process models and templates. Process templates first related to usages at the development stage. We expect the set of templates to be expanded significantly within the community environment. Due to page limitation, we are not going details such as how to implement context-awareness modelling principle.
We choose to use the most frequently used workflow patterns from [18] as our process patterns. The patterns can be captured within most common business process models and have a well-defined formal foundation. We provide nine control flow patterns for the process-oriented mashups in Figure 2. A pattern is an abstraction from a concrete form which keeps recurring in specific non-arbitrary context [19]. The use of patterns is a proven practice in the context of programming, as evidenced by the impact made by the design patterns of Gamma et al. [20] as well as various other patterns. Besides applying process patterns at the process modelling stage, end users can obtain support in case the application of a pattern causes a modelling error and the sequence of applied patterns can be traced during process editing time.
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The workflow patterns from [18] are however too finegrained and not sufficiently enriched with information on the context and consequences to represent a reusable solution. Therefore, we introduce process templates that are different combinations of process patterns. The processes represented by a process template are sound. Certain process templates can be enriched with the information that they are valid for different domains, i.e. business context. Using patterns, the soundness of process models can be guaranteed in certain ways [21]. The patterns can further be used to develop domain-specific process templates. Following context-aware modelling principle, it allows adapting the best fitting process artefacts during selections e.g. fill in context information such as particular industry, location, and process name. A specific process template will appear to the users. Context-aware modelling can manage process artefacts effec-
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The great challenge is to balance ease of use and executability. For ease of use, we mean easy for non-modellingexpert users and minimizing designs from scratch. Learning by examples style is an efficient learning method in a community environment. At the same time, we also provide a minimum amount of language notations to minimize the learning efforts. Some pre-design process templates and models can be selected. They can also serve as a learning model or a base for end users to create a new process model. The demanded executable process modelling language needs to be precise and disambiguation. In order to simplify business process modelling, models must be highly reusable and favouring process flexibility. There is wide agreement that patterns can accelerate the process of designing a solution and reduce modelling time. Patterns enable participants of a community to communicate more effectively, with greater conciseness and less ambiguity [14], [15], [16]. We have adopted eight notations from BPMN. Research shows that the average subset of BPMN used in these models consists of just nine different symbols [17]. Notation pool and lanes are droped because they are used for expressing process collaborations. In the lightweight process modelling a process collaboration can be expressed from indivitual business partners perspective and a integrated view should be generated by the process editor. We futher adapted the notation for multiple instance business processes. The used notations are presented in Figure 1.
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tively e.g. fill in activity name of a process model or template using the context information. Using ontology, we can unify names of equal activities/tasks in different process models.
To fully exploit the potential of web-centric compositions, we need work on further.
V. E VALUATION
The authors would like to thank the EU SOA4All project. Part of work from Dr. Lai Xu and Dr. Paul de Vreize has been performed at the SAP Research, Switzerland.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The evaluation of our lightweight process modelling approach is based on iterative lab experiments i.e., experiments that involves real end users carrying out several tasks. We have already exposed different versions of our environment at an early stage to target groups. Process patterns and certain process templates has been reviewed by a research group of a big telecommunications company and one Internet Services Provider (ISP). The telecommunications company provides next generation services on top of existing telecom services provided on a internet-based platform. Third parties can also create new services on this platform. Therefore, this new platform should provide a manageable process modelling language to the end users. The research group identified that process template do support the modelling activities in great extent. Furthermore, they verified that end users of the mentioned platform might not be able to create a complex process model. They should however be able to read a reasonably simple process model. Therefore, with some clarification efforts, they should be able to handle the process templates we provided in the telecommunications domain. The ISP is trying to launch a Customer-to-Customer (C2C) Service e-Commerce framework to its customers. They claim that the typical user of the C2C Service e-Commerce framework will have a hard time to distinguish the different versions of split and join types. Next step, we are going to extent our modelling language and method which the users can select process templates according to textual descriptions and goal specifications according to context information of end users. The process templates will provide a means to train the end users in achieving the next level of process modelling. Another aspect is enabling a community environment for process modelling in a Web 2.0 style. The more people participate in modelling, the more process templates are created and ranked. Hence the chances of finding a matching template will increase. Overall, the current evaluation results showed us that the proposed modelling framework helps to guide and support modellers and potentially lowers the complexity of process modelling.
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VI. C ONCLUSION Internet has a continous impact on everyday life. Webbased technologies do not only impact to our communication patterns, they also provide opportunities to bring information or knowledge to our daily activities. Process composition has turned out to be the potential useful technology for SOA-based business integration. It provides an agile approach to adapt to fast paced business environments. This paper has presented the new concept of lightweight business process modelling.
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