Monday, July 13, 2009

Business Process Management (Part-1 Foundation[Chapter I Introduction] ) Sec F -- By Mathias Weske

Goals, Structure, and Organization

Before the structure of this book is discussed, a summary of the goals of
business process management is given.
Arguably, the most important goal of business process management is a
better understanding of the operations a company performs and their relationships.
The explicit representation of business processes is the core concept
to achieving this better understanding.
Identifying the activities and their relationships and representing them
by business process models allows stakeholders to communicate about these
processes in an efficient and effective manner. Using business process models
as common communication artefacts, business processes can be analyzed, and
potentials for improving them can be developed.
Flexibility—the ability to change—is the key operational goal of business
process management. The subjects of change are diverse. Business process
management not only supports changing the organizational environment of
the business process, but also facilitates changes in the software layer without
changing the overall business process. Flexibility in business process management
is discussed in detail in Section 3.10.
A repository of the business processes that a company performs is an
important asset. To some extent, it captures knowledge of how the company
performs its business. Therefore, business process models can be regarded as
a means to expressing knowledge of the operation of a company.
But business process management also facilitates continuous process improvement.
The idea is to evolutionarily improve the organization of work
a company performs. Explicit representations of business processes are well
suited for identifying potentials for improvement, but they can also be used
to compare actual cases with the specified process models. While in principle
more radical business process reengineering activities can also be supported
by business processes, evolutionary measures to improve business processes
might in many cases be the favourable solution.
Business process management also aims at narrowing the gap between
business processes that a company performs and the realization of these processes
in software. The vision is that there is a precisely specified relationship between an activity in the business process layer and its realization in software.
A business process model is used to represent the structure of this book, as
shown in Figure 1.7. The book is organized into three parts, providing a foundation
of business process management, looking at concepts and languages
for business process modelling, and investigating architectures and methodologies.
In Figure 1.7, each part is represented by a rounded rectangle that includes
its chapters; dependencies between chapters are shown as directed arcs, indicating
a recommended order of reading.
Part I continues with Chapter 2, which looks at business process management
from a software systems point of view by investigating the evolution
of enterprise systems architectures. The role of business process management
systems and the relationships to other types of information systems are highlighted.
Part II covers business process modelling. Chapter 3 presents the foundation
of business process modelling by introducing abstraction concepts. It
also introduces a way to describe process models and process instances based on fundamental concepts, such as events that occur during the execution of
business process instances and their dependencies.
Chapter 4 looks at process orchestrations by first discussing control flow
patterns. The meaning of these patterns is expressed by properties of process
instances using these patterns. A metamodel is used to specify the semantics
of control flow patterns. An important part of this book deals with process
modelling techniques and notations. The most important ones are discussed in
a concise manner, including Petri nets, event-driven process chains, workflow
nets, Yet Another Workflow Language, a graph-based workflow language, and
the Business Process Modeling Notation.
Process choreographies are covered in Chapter 5. Process choreographies
describe the interaction of multiple business processes and, as such, are an important
concept for supporting business-to-business collaboration. After introducing
high-level choreographies that specify dependencies between interactions
of choreographies, service interaction patterns are discussed. Interesting
issues occur with regard to the correctness of combined execution when combining
multiple business processes. These issues are addressed by discussing
the notion of compatibility.
Properties of business process models are investigated in Chapter 6. Correct
data dependencies within a process are a simple type of correctness property
of a business process. Other correctness criteria have been proposed as
different types of soundness criteria. If a business process is sound, then each
process instance enjoys certain execution guarantees, for instance, freedom
from deadlock. There are different types of soundness properties, each of which
takes into account some specific aspect of the business process executed. During
the first reading, Chapters 5 and 6 might be skipped, because they are
not essential to follow the later parts of the book.
Part III investigates architectures of business process management systems
and methodologies to develop business process applications. Chapter 7
introduces traditional workflow management architectures and flexible workflow
management architectures that allow us to modify processes dynamically.
Based on a discussion of Web services as the current implementation
of service-oriented architectures, Web services composition is discussed as the
mechanism to realize business processes whose activities are implemented by
Web services. To ease the composition of services, advanced service composition,
which takes advantage of semantic annotations of services, is discussed.
Chapter 7 completes by introducing data-driven process control and its realization
in case handling systems.
Chapter 8 introduces a methodology for the development of business
process applications involving human users. This methodology provides an
understanding of the complexity and of the technical and organizational difficulties
in the design and development of business process applications.

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