with the aid of Business Process Management and XML authoring software suites .... parts up to a complete business document according to the rules of CCTS, ...
Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability Fenareti Lampathaki, Sotiris Koussouris, George Gionis, Yannis Charalabidis, and Dimitris Askounis National Technical National Technical University of Athens, 9 Iroon Polytechniou, Athens, Greece {flamp,skoussouris,gionis,yannisx,askous}@epu.ntua.gr
Abstract. Pan-European policies envisioning a single European market and reduction of administrative burden call for effective, interoperable implementation and transformation of cross-border business-to-government services. Despite the existence of dedicated tools and methodologies that enable modelling and execution of cross-organizational business processes, a service-driven approach, that implies associating legal and business rules on the workflow, binding reusable documents with specific information exchanges among the stakeholders and extracting all-inclusive executable flows, remains to be adopted. In this context, the present paper outlines cross-dimensional patterns for modelling and transforming pan-European Business to Government Services interconnecting processes, data and rules under a common, cross-country prism. Such modeldriven patterns foster interoperability on a conceptual and platform-independent basis. Discussion on the results is targeting best practices that can be drawn at research level and is pointing out the key difficulties that have to be tackled due to lack of enterprises’ and public organizations’ readiness in various countries. Keywords: Enterprise Modelling, Data Modelling, Legal Rules, Pan-European Business to Government Services, Interoperability.
1 Introduction As governments across the world try to estimate and exploit the impact of Web 2.0 tools [1], their traditional role in service provision confronts a key challenge: the deployment of personalized, high quality electronic services through multiple channels needs to be accelerated, even if this requires changing their modus operandi. Moving towards a single European market, current advancements in the eGovernment domain, such as the EU Services Directive 2006/123/EC and the i2010 Strategic Framework, call for effective implementation of cross-border public sector services, also known as Pan-European Governmental Services (PEGS), which make the need for interoperability resolution more urgent and complex - due to the organizational, cultural and legal barriers. R. Meersman, P. Herrero, and T. Dillon (Eds.): OTM 2009 Workshops, LNCS 5872, pp. 152–161, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business
153
In Computer Science and the new academic and research discipline, namely Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), services are autonomous, platform-independent entities that can be described, published, discovered, and loosely coupled in novel ways. Any piece of code and any application component deployed on a system can be reused and transformed into a network-available service [2]. In order to establish a systematic approach to public service design, services often tend to be considered as complex service systems. The challenges in such consideration include both the multidisciplinary nature of public services which combine ‘business’, technology, and organizational dimensions, and the lack of formal representations of public services. In the public sector, though, services shall obtain an even more holistic view incorporating both the conventional and the electronic services, as well as web services. In this direction, Business Process Management has been established as a recent trend in public administrations worldwide, following a relevant adoption by large enterprises. Although BPM in enterprises is often satisfactory, its application in public sector processes reveals important specificities and issues that need to be tackled [3] as: • Public sector organizations offer a large number of service types, usually being at the range of a few thousand and the documents needed as inputs, or are produced as outputs of the above are also counted at the range of several thousand. • Processes are highly structured: information requirements, methods for processing information and desired formats are known precisely. • Public services are run in silos, which constrain effectiveness in providing integrated and cost-effective services to customers. By breaking the siloed business processes into reusable services, and executing them with innovative serviceoriented technical architecture and infrastructure services, new pathways to future service business revenue and profitability success may open up [4]. • Legal issues have to be considered when a significant process change is to be performed in a set of public services, requiring the interconnected management of the legal elements and structures that affect the targeted services. Gaining knowledge and best practices from the implementation of several research projects (such as FP6 GENESIS, ATHENA-IP and FP7 COIN-IP, ONE) and EU member states initiatives, the present paper outlines a methodological framework for modelling pan-European e-Government services towards enterprises. The proposed methodology has already been applied to a set of targeted countries including Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Turkey and Cyprus, for which core Government to Business (G2B) services, including VAT reporting and payment, Income Tax, e-Procurement / e-Invoicing and Intrastat reporting processes, were effectively modelled and transformed [5]. The paper is structured as follows: In the second chapter, the proposed Crosscountry Government to Business pattern driven modelling methodology is outlined and analyzed. Chapter 3 discusses the main findings of this research and finally chapter 4 concludes by presenting the conclusions and the future steps towards a unified, interoperable and coherent Government to Business transaction environment.
154
F. Lampathaki et al.
2 Cross-Country Government to Business Transformation Methodology 2.1 Background Government to Business Modelling has received considerable attention recently by both business administration and computer science communities [6] as tools and methodologies are emerging to enable modelling and execution of crossorganizational business processes, and standards are being defined using guidelines and best practice approaches [7]. Much of the literature produced by the business process management community would suggest that implementing process orientated structures will help organizations to be more responsive to an increasingly changing environment: • The concept of Process Modelling has a long tradition from enterprise frameworks identifying and relating different architectural viewpoints and the modelling techniques associated with them [8], to state-of-the-art visual notations that represent business processes and their transformation into executable workflows [2]. Such standards typically provide a common notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts to the technical developers and business people. • When it comes to data and documents modelling, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and XML Schemas cannot help being in the foreground. According to [9], the UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS), as well as the Universal Business Language (UBL) also provide remarkable results through the utilization of reusable data components in order to allow for reusability of data elements, and to avoid transaction errors due to ambiguous notation. • As business rules are important for organizations, legal rules can be defined as business rules with the difference that they do not originate from sources relating directly to the enterprise, but come mainly from the underlying legal and statutory framework [10]. Modelling these rules is accompanied by emerging standards, like PRR (Production Rule Representation), RIF (Rule Interchanges Format) and SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) and has gained momentum in terms of describing and automating business behavior [11]. 2.2 Cross-Dimensional Patterns for Modelling and Transformation In this paper, the proposed approach for modelling and transformation of governmental services concisely includes the following steps, during which specific ICT tools are being applied: 1. Identification and prioritization of the services to be transformed. 2. Preparation of common libraries, definition of naming rules and formulation of semantically rich codelists, to be followed. 3. Unified modelling of the business processes to be transformed in each country, with the aid of Business Process Management and XML authoring software suites – properly extended to support additional features. The modelling aspects cover the legal, the organizational, the procedural, the semantic and the technological
Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business
155
aspects, in compliance with internationally accepted standards, such as Business Process Modelling Language (BPMN), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), United Nations’ Core component Technical Specification (UN/CEFACT CCTS) and Unified Business Language (UBL). Throughout this phase, existing patterns in terms of process flow, data and rules are investigated and compared against other knows standards (like ebXML, UBL, etc) in order to build reusable blocks that will be present in the generic models. 4. Harmonization & generalization efforts that produce generic, country-independent models for the services at pan-European level. Such models, which contain the patterns recognized during the previous step, are the foundation for enabling interoperability between administrations and businesses, providing for crosscountry electronic services, such as a generic VAT statement and payment process. 5. Analysis of the differences, discrepancies and different granularity levels observed among the models of the countries, leading to recommendations on amending the existing legislative framework accordingly in order to transform the processes and satisfy the generic models that enable interoperability. Such a methodology can run over increasing cycles (spiral approach), starting from a limited set of ‘core services’ for businesses and iteratively expanding, following the steps described above, until it covers all public B2G services. The contribution of this approach can be summarized as: • Adopting a Unified Modelling perspective complying with Model-Driven Architecture and taking into account not only process and workflow aspects, but also the data and the legal rules viewpoints at various granularity levels, as well. • Unveiling a rationale for harmonizing cross-country service models in compliance with the underlying legal framework and the specific country requirements by using the in-process recognized and reusable patterns of workflow, data and rules. • Bridging and coordinating public services modelling and transformation efforts at a cross-country level. 2.2.1 Preparatory Analysis of the Methodological Framework Since modelling and transforming all the public services at once is not feasible, due to the huge investments needed which will not present a high ROI rate in the short-term, selecting the well-timed policy domains and the corresponding public services of interest in order to pilot the proposed approach is thus not a step that should be underestimated since such a testbed may judge its prospective adoption. In this context, an initial set of service scenarios can be built on the basis of a multi-criteria evaluation framework consisting of criteria actual administrative cost of a service, its alignment with key e-Business and e-Government policies and standards, such as the UBL services and the i2010 List of 20 Basic Public Services towards businesses, etc. This kind of analysis will lead to the decision of which services should be prioritized and modelled in advance of others, in order to formulate a “core” public service set, containing the most important and valuable services, which will not only act as a probe for the verification of the methodology, but also as the foundation for future services to be constructed on top of it. During the modelling preparation phase, a set of infrastructures are being set up in order to ensure that the modelling and transformation phases that follow will run
156
F. Lampathaki et al.
smoothly and at the same level of granularity for all the stakeholders’ countries. Such infrastructures include: • Recommendation and adoption of common naming and design rules as a quality framework for the homogeneous design of models. Such rules at a cross-country level mandate the use of the English language. • Preparation of common libraries or pools for reusable assets, such as documents, organizations. Use “entry points” that help starting with the description of processrelated information without to work on the process model itself, Documents, IT Resources, Information Exchanges, and Roles. • Definition of glossaries and code lists • Decision on the level of detail (or abstraction) by which all processes will be described. This is not an easy part since there the process/subprocess/task terms often are overlapped and may lead to confusion. Furthermore, if the authorities have deployed infrastructures for managing e-Government knowledge around the services, such Service Registries and Core Directories [12] need to be exploited as they publish a great amount of explicit knowledge. 2.2.2 Unified Business Processes Modelling Phase In this phase, the Modelling Framework Granularity Levels are recognized taking into account the national and cross-country nature of the transactions between enterprises and governmental organizations (B2G transactions). Such modelling aspects from which modelling activities shall begin can be further detailed into: • Business Processes, with the complete workflow, the internal actions and activities performed during the process execution described in compliance with BPMN, as to be in a position to extract executable code in BPEL for the automation of the transactions in future systems. • Documents and Data acting as the interfaces of the business processes that require interaction with other external parties. It should be noted that documents are perceived as any documentation that contains information which is relevant either for supporting an activity or communicating and include both electronic and printed documents. Documents are constructed using CCTS which at a later stage contribute to the definition of the XLM Schema of the generic documents to be used during the actual transaction. • Rules embracing both business rules which are used from the different stakeholders either enterprises or governmental organizations and legal rules that govern the service execution and differ from country to country. Rules are described using the SBVR specification and are infiltrated both in the decision points of the processes and in the different documents in order to manage and drive the flow of the transaction in alignment with the existing legislative frameworks. As far as business processes dimension is concerned, the description views fall into three levels [13]: • Private Process view: shows all activities which are performed within the process. The focus is set on as-is organizational process modelling, it means activities like internal decisions or internal administrative work are also included. Such activities
Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business
157
usually provide rich information on organizational units, IT resources, business and legal rules that impact the process design. • Public Process view: only shows activities that are useful to understand the relevant process outputs and communication with an external entity. The significant process logic has to be indicated as well. Activities of the external entity are not described: the description scope ends with an indication about the exchanged documents and messages. • Collaboration Process view: shows a consolidation of public processes for all the involved entities/roles. Public activities of each role are being linked through messages. Interactions are then visualized very easily and are the basis for more technical process description. In business data modelling, three main artifacts can be exploited [14]: • Core Data Types (CDT): Pre-defined by the UN/CEFACT, build the foundation of the GENESIS core component data modelling approach. The UN/CEFACT CDT defines the smallest and generic (without any semantic meaning) pieces of information in a business document with relevant characteristics. In this way, UN/CEFACT has created an unambiguous basis of atomic business information parts up to a complete business document according to the rules of CCTS, based on 21 standardized and well established data types (Amount, Binary Object, Code, Date, Date Time, Duration, Graphic, Identifier, Indicator, etc). • Reusable Business Information Entities (BIEs) which are the building blocks used to assemble business documents. As defined in the CCTS meta-model, Basic Business Information Entities (BBIEs), Aggregated Business Information Entities (ABIEs), and Association Business Information Entities (ASBIEs) are the reusable building blocks that are used during data modelling. • Specific Business Document (SBD) summarizing information about a complete and user-specific document and is referenced in user-specific process models. SBDs include context information that specifies the business environment in which they can be used. According to the different levels of IT knowledge of each role owner, the SBD distinguishes between “Unstructured Documentation” and “Structured Documentation”. The unstructured documentation requires only basic input on a business document like “Business information entity” (the name of the data field), “Mandatory”, and “Formatting Rules”. It allows a user with a limited technical know-how to easily describe a business document. Derived from the unstructured documentation, the structured information is then created. In order to create sound models of legal rules, a legal rules meta-model has been designed and defined in detail in [15]. The basic entities that need to be captured and interconnected with business processes and documents are: • Legal Framework which is a collection of basic conditions or parameters that an organization has to consider when conducting business. This may happen on a mandatory basis (the case with legal rules) or there may be voluntarily incorporated frameworks (like business rules or optional statutory guidelines). • Legal Element that defines a single element of a complete framework collection and is used to refine the view on entire frameworks. These elements affect the data Core Components used to generate the Business Documents of a transaction party.
158
F. Lampathaki et al.
• Rule defining the notion of rule (legal or business). These rules are inserted in the decision points of a collaborative process model in order to steer the execution of the transaction based on the underlying legislation, and are also present in the Business Documents in order to dictate the mandatory information which needs to be exchanged during the transaction. The models created in this phase focus on as-is situation and are characterized as Specific Representations – Variants that depend on the business context and combine the dimensions of Country, End-user and IT-system. Each variant is described and documented according to the pre-defined Description Views (Private, Public and Collaboration Process View) and Description Elements (Process, Rules, Documents).
Fig. 1. Unified Business Processes Modelling Granularity Levels
2.2.3 Harmonization and Generalization Phase When it comes to implement cross-country, different end-users and supporting IT systems transactions, the variants do not cover the necessary requirements for a generic representation, but provide insight on specific, narrow representations. Generalization and harmonization activities of the Specific Representation thus need to follow in order to lead to a Generic Representation of each process at the same abstraction level of the description elements (processes, rules, and data). In this context, "Generic" means that this process is not specific to countries, end users or systems, but considers all special requirements and recognized patterns and is the common denominator of the relevant variants. At data level, the Generic Business Document (GBD) can be considered a consolidated version of several user-specific documents and features all data items
Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business
159
that occur in any of the affiliated SBDs. The idea behind the establishment of GBDs was to create data templates that can be used by all organizations at cross-country level and only need to be restricted according to their context to exactly match their respective business requirements. GBDs are then referenced from the harmonized collaboration process model. They also include contextual information to allow a (potentially) automated derivation of specific business documents.
3 Discussion Cross-dimensional patterns for modelling and transforming pan-European Business to Government Services by interconnecting processes, data and rules under a common, cross-country prism appear as a worthwhile track towards the implementation of B2G electronic services. From the application of the proposed methodological patterns in numerous European members states towards their governmental services modelling and transformation, important artifacts are presented with the application of generally available software tools, such as unified processes in BPMN and BPEL, universal CCTS-compliant syntax-independent schemas and XML Schemas, business and legal rules regulating the transactions expressed in a syntax-independent manner and as a SBVR vocabulary, for instance for automated income tax reporting and payment for Small and Medium Enterprises results from 7 countries have been collected and aggregated to create generic models. Problems faced during the adoption and application of the proposed methodology were not trivial and have to be to be taken in mind during relevant attempts by enterprises and government officials. Recognizing process and data reusable patterns within the specific-country variants in order to create generic models in compliance with the legal framework presupposes an agreed level of detail (or abstraction) by which all the models are described. In this context, strict modelling conventions and rules need to be applied and process and data models have to be re-worked to conform to such guidelines, otherwise automatic generation of executable code (in BPEL for processes and XML Schema for documents) fails. Conflicts in the legal framework of each country that lead to differences in the process workflow cannot be ignored under any circumstances and create exceptions in the generic models. Such exceptions in the generic process models that describe the current as-is situation of the involved stakeholders in order to conduct cross-country transactions can indeed inform the reference country or organization about possible malfunctioning services and potential points that should be re-engineered. Differences in data models, on the other hand, are resolved either during the mapping procedure from specific-country to generic data models (for example by recognizing synonyms, abbreviations, etc.) or through proper customization of context within generic data models. Models management and evolution are also crucial matters when it comes to the long term exploitation and viability of the proposed methodological framework. The adoption of a common “governance policy” including the change management procedures, the roles involved and the permissions allowed to the modelers needs to be defined in detail. As far as the data modelling aspects are concerned, customization issues of information modelling building blocks that reside in a repository should be handled through (not rigid enough) rules that allow users not only to use predefined
160
F. Lampathaki et al.
templates but also to customize / extend these templates according to their needs in compliance with a customization procedure. Finally, it needs to be mentioned that attaching legal rules expressed in a clear and straightforward phrasing (after having taken into consideration all the pertinent passages of the regulatory framework and all their relevant interpretations) in the modelling viewpoints appears as the most important element in a Business to Government Service, since they are the ones that dictate not only the execution of the workflow, but also the required data sets. What emerges from incorporating legal rules in the B2G services and their nature (as national governments set mandatory rules within legislation which should be respected by the other entities) is that legal interoperability aspects cannot be underestimated and homogenization and harmonization of legislation between the different countries at a pan-European level is a key driver that should be resolved in order to enable true interoperability.
4 Conclusions Motivated by the increasing need to achieve interoperability among small-medium enterprises and governmental organizations, this paper has presented design patterns for modelling and transforming pan-European B2G Services that cross the dimensions and provide equal attention to processes, data and rules. The proposed methodological framework builds on the principles of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and provides conceptual and platform-independent models on two axes: specific-country models that define the current situation in every country and generic models which are extracted out of the specific-country ones in order to add an abstraction layer and facilitate cross-country transactions. As the proposed methodological patterns have already been applied in the EUfunded research project GENESIS [5], future steps along our work mainly include exploration of how such cross-dimensional modelling patterns as the proposed ones can: (a) be exploited in the implementation of light-house projects at European level, such as the EC Large Scale Pilot SPOCS (Simple Procedures Online for Cross-border Services), which aims to meet the requirements set by the Services Directive and implement a first set of on-line Pan-European G2B Services, and (b) be further elicited in order to provide for automatic, on the fly generation of generic models based on the specific-country ones. Acknowledgments. This paper has been created closely to research activities during the EU-funded projects GENESIS (Contract Number FP6-027867) and GIC (Contract Number FP7- 204999).
References [1] Pascu, C., Osimo, D., Turlea, G., Ulbrich, M., Punie, Y., Burgelman, J.-C.: Social computing: implications for the EU innovation landscape. Foresight 10(1), 37–52 (2008) [2] Papazoglou, M.P., Traverso, P., Dustdar, S., Leymann, F.: Service-Oriented Computing: State of the Art and Research Challenges. IEEE Computer 40 (11), 38–45 (2007)
Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business
161
[3] Becker, J., Pfeiffer, D., Räckers, M.: Domain Specific Process Modelling in Public Administrations – The PICTURE-Approach. In: Wimmer, M.A., Scholl, J., Grönlund, Å. (eds.) EGOV 2007. LNCS, vol. 4656, pp. 68–79. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) [4] Demirkan, H., Kauffman, R., Vayghan, J., Fill, H.-J., Karagiannis, D., Maglio, P.: Service-oriented technology and management: Perspectives on research and practice for the coming decade. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 7, 356–376 (2008) [5] GENESIS Project (2009), http://www.genesis-ist.eu [6] Weske, M.: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures (2007) [7] Lippe, S., Ulrike, G., Barros, A.: A Survey on State of the Art to Facilitate Modelling of Cross-Organizational Business Processes. In: 2nd GI Workshop XML4BPM, pp. 7–22 (2005) [8] Lankhorst, M.: Enterprise Architecture at Work (2005) [9] Lampathaki, F., Mouzakitis, S., Gionis, G., Charalabidis, Y., Askounis, D.: Business to Business Interoperability: A Current Review of XML Data Integration Standards. Computer Standards & Interfaces 31, 1045–1055 (2009) [10] Gionis, G., Charalabidis, Y., Sourouni, K., Askounis, D.: Enabling Cross-Border Interoperability: Modelling Legal Rules for Electronic Transactions in the European Union. In: Enterprise Interoperability II. New Challenges and Approaches (2007b) [11] Graml, T., Bracht, R., Spies, M.: Patterns of Business Rules to Enable Agile Business Processes. In: EDOC 2007, Annapolis Maryland, U.S.A. (2007) [12] Sourouni, A.-M., Lampathaki, F., Mouzakitis, S., Charalabidis, Y., Askounis, D.: Paving the way to eGovernment transformation: Interoperability registry infrastructure development. In: Wimmer, M.A., Scholl, H.J., Ferro, E. (eds.) EGOV 2008. LNCS, vol. 5184, pp. 340–351. Springer, Heidelberg (2008) [13] Koussouris, S., Gionis, G., Sourouni, A.-M., Askounis, D., Kalaboukas, K.: Heterogeneous Domains’ e-Business Transactions Interoperability with the use of Generic Process Models. In: Enterprise Interoperability III: New Challenges and Industrial Approaches, pp. 159–170 (2008) [14] Lampathaki, F., Mouzakitis, S., Janner, T., Schroth, C., Askounis, D., Hoyer, V.: Achieving Cross-Country Electronic Documents Interoperability with the help of a CCTS-based Modelling Framework. EJETA 2(3) (2008) [15] Gionis, G., Charalabidis, Y., Janner, T., Schroth, C., Koussouris, S., Askounis, D.: Enabling Cross-Organizational Interoperability: A Hybrid e-Business Architecture. In: Enterprise Interoperability II. New Challenges and Approaches (2007)
