Plenary Talk: Towards Seamless Business Process and Dialogue Specification Dirk Draheim Software Competence Center Hagenberg Softwarepark 21, 4232 Hagenberg, Austria E-mail:
[email protected] Executable specification or automatic programming [12] has always been a major strand of research to improve development and maintenance of Software systems. In the domain of enterprise applications the issue of executable specification is currently addressed by business process execution initiatives. We have seen steady efforts to make business process specifications executable, both in academia [5] and industry [10]. There are two non-mutual and converging research areas that foster this trend, i.e., business process modeling, e.g., [11], and workflow management [7]. Business processes are an issue in enterprises, e.g., [6], even without executable semantics of processes. And therefore, the subject of investigation in the business process modeling community is business process excellence, i.e., understanding best business processes, rather than exact semantics. Business process modeling languages are usually no more than visualizations of spoken language with all its ambiguities. Using a business process modeling language does not guarantee at all an improved exactness of the system description. However, it clearly eases communication between stakeholders and therefore fosters requirement elicitation substantially. Paradoxically, the vague semantics of typical business process modeling languages might be a reason for that. However, the gap remains; there is no canonical mapping between the components that are under the control of workflow technology and the entities addressed by business process modeling. Furthermore, the view of business process modeling is rather a global one, i.e., the net of business activities and exchanged information entities. The view of workflow control is also a local one, looking at the human computer interaction and having a concrete work list paradigm at hand for processing workflows. Workflow control has its origins in concrete technologies for computer-supported collaborative work based on document processing [2] like Palo Alto’s OfficeTalk [4] or Polymer [9] on the one hand and in more general rapid development frameworks based on a work list paradigm like FlowMark [8] on the other hand. A lot of today’s commercial so-called BPM (Business Process Management) suites [10]
actually started as workflow management products. However, we expect more from business process orientation than rapid development and better system maintainability. Support for advanced techniques like business process monitoring and business process simulation is desired. Current BPM and workflow technologies are not fully integrated with the application programs that make up the dialogues of an enterprise application. This means that BPM technology controls the workflow states and not the dialogues that bridge the workflow states. The dialogue states are not seen by BPM technology. This means, most importantly, that the dialogues are not amenable to advanced BPM techniques like business process monitoring and business process simulation. Today, BPM technology is successfully used in enterprise application projects in the following sense: some rules in the interplay of existing enterprise applications are identified and these rules are then automized by a BPM product. On the other hand, if a workflowintensive system should be built with BPM technology from scratch it is not obvious any more how to design the human computer interaction. The problem is to fix the right granularity of workflow versus dialogue states. Unfortunately, despite some heuristics [13] it still lacks a systematic treatment of this question. We follow a different, fundamental approach: we want to unify workflow states and dialogue states so that the aforementioned problem simply does not appear any more. An immediate major benefit of this is that advanced BPM techniques are no longer artificially restricted to some coarse-grained workflow states, they become pervasive. Furthermore, the business logic is partitioned naturally into services of appropriate granularity this way. The decision which parts of the supported business process is subject to workflow technology and which parts make the dialogues is orthogonal to the specification of the business process. The definition can be changed allowing for more flexibility in business process specification. In order to unify workflows and dialogues it is necessary to investigate advanced role-model concepts from a workflow patterns perspective. There has been a rigorous discussion of workflow patterns in the workflow commu-
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nity [14] that helped in the investigation and analytical comparison of existing workflow technology. We will broaden the workflow pattern discussion by the consideration of different users and roles, because user and role models are at the heart of the workflow paradigm. This way, a human computer interaction viewpoint is brought to the discussion of workflow patterns that refines the current global, i.e., observational viewpoint of an overall action flow. In these efforts the findings of form-oriented analysis [3] serve as a basis. Here, the single user session of a submit/responsestyle system is defined as typed, bipartite state machine. The human-computer interaction is form-oriented - it consists of an ongoing interchange of report presentations and form submissions. We identified the notion of work list as an interaction pattern in single user session scenarios [1] and want to generalize the defined semantic apparatus to a form-oriented workflow definition language.
flow Management Coalition, Lighthouse Point, Florida, USA, 1995. [8] Frank Leymann and Dieter Roller. Business Process Management with FlowMark. Proceedings of IEEE Compcon, March 1994. [9] Dirk E. Mahling, Noel Craven and W. Bruce Croft. From Office Automation to Intelligent Workflow Systems. IEEE Intelligent Systems 19(3), 41-47, 1995. [10] Derek Miers, Paul Harmon, Curt Hall. The 2006 BPM Suites Report. Business Process Trends, 2006. [11] Object Management Group. Business Process Modeling Notation Specification. OMG Final Adopted Specification, dtc/06-02-01, Object Management Group, February 2006.
References
[12] David L. Parnas. Software Aspects of Strategic Defense Systems. Software Engineering Notes, ACM Sigsoft, vol. 10, no. 5, ACM Press, October 1985.
[1] Sandrine Balbo, Dirk Draheim, Christof Lutteroth, and Gerald Weber. Appropriateness of User Interfaces to Tasks. In (Alan Dix, Anke Dittmar, Eds.): Proceedings of TAMODIA 2005 - 4th International Workshop on Task Models and Diagrams for User Interface Design – For Work and Beyond, ACM Press, 2005.
[13] Bob Stegmaier, Mike Ebbers, Tomislav Begovac. Image and Workflow Library: FlowMark V2.3 Design Guidelines. IBM International Technical Support Organization, 1998.
[2] Dines Bjørner. Documents: A Domain Analysis. Retirement Lecture at The Technical University of Denmark, available at: http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/ db/, 27th March 2007, pp. 1-23.
[14] W.M.P. van der Aalst, A.H.M. Hofstede, B. Kiepuszewski, A.P. Barros. Workflow Patterns. Distributed and Parallel Databases 14: 5-51, 2003.
[3] Dirk Draheim, Gerald Weber. Form-Oriented Analysis - A New Methodology to Model FormBased Applications. Springer, 2005. [4] Clarence A. Ellis and Marc Bernal. Officetalk-D: An Experimental Office Information System. ACM SIGOA Newsletter, vol. 3, no. 1-2, June 1982. [5] Diimitrios Georgakopoulos, Mark Hornick, Amit Sheth. An Overview of Workflow Management. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 3, pp. 119153, 1995. [6] Michael Hammer and James Champy. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Business Essentials, 2004. [7] David Hollingworth. The Workflow Reference Model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Work-
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