Zur Bedeutung von Gestaltungswissen für die gestaltungsorientierte Wirtschaftsinformatik

In general, research in business and information systems engineering (BISE) focuses on the design of business information systems. So far, the prevailing design-oriented research has taken a technique-oriented perspective, which focuses on the creation and application of innovative techniques such as methods, models, software prototypes, and similar artifacts for system design. In this paper we argue that design knowledge is of considerable importance for system design. Relevant design knowledge includes, for example, knowledge about design objectives, design techniques, and effects resulting from the use of techniques. This design knowledge can be produced, evaluated, and used in a scientific way. In this paper we present necessary basics for conceptualizing design knowledge. We illustrate the applicability of the conceptual foundations and the relevance of design knowledge using the example of “event-driven process chains (EPC)”. A discussion of implications of the presented results and future challenges for design-oriented BISE concludes the contribution.     

Automated code generation of dynamic specializations: an approach based on design patterns and formal techniques

In this work, we present an automatic code generation process from conceptual models. This process incorporates the use of design patterns in OO-Method, an automated software production method, which is built on a formal object-oriented model called OASIS. Our approach defines a precise mapping between conceptual patterns, design patterns and their implementation. Design patterns make the code generation process easy because they provide methodological guidance to go from the problem space to the solution space. In order to understand these ideas, we introduce a complete code generation process for conceptual models that have dynamic specialization relationships. This proposal can be incorporated into CASE tools, making the automation of the software production process feasible.     

Structuredness and its significance for correctness of process models

Recent research has shown that business process models from practice suffer from several quality problems. In particular, the correctness of control flow has been analyzed for industry-scale collections of process models revealing that error ratios are surprisingly high. In the past the structuredness property has been discussed as a guideline to avoid errors, first in research on programming, and later also in business process modeling. In this paper we investigate the importance of structuredness for process model correctness from an empirical perspective. We introduce definitions of two metrics that quantify the (un)structuredness of a process model, the degree of structuredness and the unmatched connector count. Then, we use the event-driven process chain models of the SAP reference model for validating the capability of these metrics to predict error probability. Our findings clearly support the importance of structuredness as a design principle for achieving correctness in process models.     

Quality indicators for business process models from a gateway complexity perspective

ContextQuality assurance of business process models has been recognized as an important factor for modeling success at an enterprise level. Since quality of models might be subject to different interpretations, it should be addressed in the most objective way, by the application of measures. That said, however, assessment of measurement results is not a straightforward task: it requires the identification of relevant threshold values, which are able to distinguish different levels of process model quality.ObjectiveSince there is no consensual technique for obtaining these values, this paper proposes the definition of thresholds for gateway complexity measures based on the application of statistical techniques on empirical data.MethodTo this end, we conducted a controlled experiment that evaluates quality characteristics of understandability and modifiability of process models in two different runs. The thresholds obtained were validated in a replication of the experiment.ResultsThe thresholds for gateway complexity measures are instrumental as guidelines for novice modelers. A tool for supporting business process model measurement and improvement is described, based on the automatic application of measurement, and assessment as well as derivation of advice about how to improve the quality of the model.ConclusionIt is concluded that thresholds classified business process models in the specific level of understandability and modifiability, so these thresholds were good and useful for decision-making.     

Pattern-based e-service modelling for virtual service enterprises

Business services are customisable, interactive processes that providers have the potential to carry out together with clients that benefit from the effects. It is understood that business service transactions are best organised by means of virtual networks, where information technology allows for configuring multiple providers and processes on a per-request basis. Existing conceptual models for virtual service enterprises (VSEs) propose business service virtualisation for flexible and agile regulation and control of coordination between multiple providers and clients. In this paper, we present an approach for realising business service virtualisation based on software service technology. In particular, we propose a service-oriented software architecture for representing virtual business service processes as e-services. E-service models specify flexible business service interactions between multiple providers and clients of virtual service enterprises and allow for regulation and enforcement of their coordination. We demonstrate the utilisation of our e-service SOA in the context of an e-science scenario, where we show how to design e-service models for the use case of virtual polymorph prediction laboratories.     

Developing secure data warehouses with a UML extension

Data Warehouses (DWs), Multidimensional (MD) Databases, and On-Line Analytical Processing Applications are used as a very powerful mechanism for discovering crucial business information. Considering the extreme importance of the information managed by these kinds of applications, it is essential to specify security measures from the early stages of the DW design in the MD modeling process, and enforce them. In the past years, some proposals for representing main MD modeling properties at the conceptual level have been stated. Nevertheless, none of these proposals considers security issues as an important element in its model, so they do not allow us to specify confidentiality constraints to be enforced by the applications that will use these MD models. In this paper, we will discuss the specific confidentiality problems regarding DWs as well as present an extension of the Unified Modeling Language for specifying security constraints in the conceptual MD modeling, thereby allowing us to design secure DWs. One key advantage of our approach is that we accomplish the conceptual modeling of secure DWs independently of the target platform where the DW has to be implemented, allowing the implementation of the corresponding DWs on any secure commercial database management system. Finally, we will present a case study to show how a conceptual model designed with our approach can be directly implemented on top of Oracle 10g.     

Evolutionäre betriebliche Informationssysteme

This article reflects on existing and emerging future challenges arising in the area of “evolutionary business information systems”, a class of systems that demand an evolutionary software development process and which support secondary design of various conceptual layers. We place both existing contributions and future research opportunities in context by referring to an idealized, preliminary system architecture. Finally, we emphasize our pluralistic perspective on the research object and the resulting need for methodological flexibility in the sense of interdisciplinary configurations of research methods.     

一种面向软件产品概念设计的CSCW模型

随着计算机和网络技术的发展,各种CSCW模型和技术先后被提出,来满足各行业产品和概念设计的复杂工作需求。软件产品的概念设计作为一项复杂的工作和业务流程,对CSCW系统的需求也越来越高。文中针对软件产品概念设计的特殊性质,提出一种新的CSCW软件产品概念设计模型,并且对其中包含的冲突检测和协调机制进行了详细的设计和优化。使用基于Java平台的相关技术对模型主要功能架构和冲突协调过程进行了仿真。实验表明,文中提出的模型具有更加简洁和高效的复杂冲突解决能力和用户交互能力。     

Specifying information systems for business process integration – A management perspective*

Supply chain management and customer relationship management are concepts for optimizing the provision of goods to customers. Information sharing and information estimation are key tools used to implement these two concepts. The reduction of delivery times and stock levels can be seen as the main managerial objectives of an integrative supply chain and customer relationship management. To achieve this objective, business processes need to be integrated along the entire supply chain including the end consumer. Information systems form the backbone of any business process integration. The relevant information system architectures are generally well-understood, but the conceptual specification of information systems for business process integration from a management perspective, remains an open methodological problem. To address this problem, we will show how customer relationship management and supply chain management information can be integrated at the conceptual level in order to provide supply chain managers with relevant information. We will further outline how the conceptual management perspective of business process integration can be supported by deriving specifications for enabling information system from business objectives. This work has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung), record no. 01HW0196.     

Incorporating technology in service-oriented i* business models: a case study

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to enterprise information systems. This interest is motivated by the need for achieving better integration of new technologies (hardware and software) with the business processes of an organization. Business processes have become more and more dependent on technologies because technology has a direct impact on business processes, changing the way they are performed and thus also affecting the way analysts design the software system. However, at the present time, there are still some gaps between the definition of business processes and the technologies used in the organization. In practice, organizations have carried out their business processes using different technologies; however, it is sometimes not possible to determine how technologies are useful in achieving current business goals. This is because business models do not explicitly consider the technologies in the organizational requirements. The goal of this paper is to present a systematic process for integrating business processes and technologies at the conceptual level. To validate our approach, we present a case study that describes the processes of the inventory management department of a public research center.     

Resilience analysis of service-oriented collaboration process management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies, it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should, however, be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e., overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and runtime.     

Verification problems in conceptual workflow specifications

Most of today's business requirements can only be accomplished through integration of various autonomous systems which were initially designed to serve the needs of particular applications. In the literature workflows are proposed to design these kinds of applications. The key tool for designing such applications is a powerful conceptual specification language. Such a language should be capable of capturing interactions and cooperation between component tasks of workflows among others. These include sequential execution, iteration, choice, parallelism and synchronisation. The central focus of this paper is the verification of such process control aspects in conceptual workflow specifications. As is generally agreed upon, that the later in the software development process an error is detected, the more it will cost to correct it; it is thus of vital importance to detect errors as early as possible in the systems-development process. In this paper some typical verification problems in workflow specifications are identified and their complexity is addressed. It will be proven that some fundamental problems are not tractable and we will show what restriction is needed to allow termination problems to be recognized in polynomial time.     

Modelling non-functional requirements of business processes

This paper presents an approach to the identification and inclusion of ‘non-functional’ aspects of a business process in modelling for business improvement. The notion of non-functional requirements (NFRs) is borrowed from software engineering, and a method developed in that field for linking NFRs to conceptual models is adapted and applied to business process modelling. Translated into this domain, NFRs are equated with the general or overall quality attributes of a business process, which, though essential aspects of any effective process, are not well captured in a functionally oriented process model. Using an example of a healthcare process (cancer registration in Jordan). We show how an analysis and evaluation of NFRs can be applied to a process model developed with role activity diagramming (RAD) to operationalise desirable quality features more explicitly in the model. This gives a useful extension to RAD and similar modelling methods, as well as providing a basis for business improvement.     

The generic model query language GMQL – Conceptual specification,implementation, and runtime evaluation

The generic model query language GMQL is designed to query collections of conceptual models created in arbitrary graph-based modelling languages. Querying conceptual models means searching for particular model subgraphs that comply with a predefined pattern query. Such a query specifies the structural and semantic properties of the model fragment to be returned. In this paper, we derive requirements for a generic model query language from the literature and formally specify the language’s syntax and semantics. We conduct an analysis of GMQL׳s theoretical and practical runtime performance concluding that it returns query results within satisfactory time. Given its generic nature, GMQL contributes to a broad range of different model analysis scenarios ranging from business process compliance management to model translation and business process weakness detection. As GMQL returns results with acceptable runtime performance, it can be used to query large collections of hundreds or thousands of conceptual models containing not only process models, but also data models or organizational charts. In this paper, we furthermore evaluate GMQL against the backdrop of existing query approaches thereby carving out its advantages and limitations as well as pointing toward future research.     

A case study about the improvement of business process models driven by indicators

Organizations are increasingly concerned about business process model improvement in their efforts to guarantee improved operational efficiency. Quality assurance of business process models should be addressed in the most objective manner, e.g., through the application of measures, but the assessment of measurement results is not a straightforward task and it requires the identification of relevant indicators and threshold values, which are able to distinguish different levels of process model quality. Furthermore, indicators must support the improvements of the models by using suitable guidelines. In this paper, we present a case study to evaluate the BPMIMA framework for BP model improvement. This framework is composed of empirically validated measures related to quality characteristics of the models, a set of indicators with validated thresholds associated with modeling guidelines and a prototype supporting tool. The obtained data suggest that the redesign by applying guidelines driven by the indicator results was successful, as the understandability and modifiability of the models were improved. In addition, the changes in the models according to guidelines were perceived as acceptable by the practitioners who participated in the case study.     

Service-oriented technology and management: Perspectives on research and practice for the coming decade

Service-oriented technologies and management have gained attention in the past few years, promising a way to create the basis for agility so that companies can deliver new, more flexible business processes that harness the value of the services approach from a customer’s perspective. Service-oriented approaches are used for developing software applications and software-as-a-service that can be sourced as virtual hardware resources, including on-demand and utility computing. The driving forces come from the software engineering community and the e-business community. Service-oriented architecture promotes the loose coupling of software components so that interoperability across programming languages and platforms, and dynamic choreography of business processes can be achieved. Nevertheless, one of today’s most pervasive and perplexing challenges for senior managers deals with how and when to make a commitment to the new practices. The purpose of this article is to shed light on multiple issues associated with service-oriented technologies and management by examining several interrelated questions: why is it appropriate now to study the related business problems from the point of view of services research? What new conceptual frameworks and theoretical perspectives are appropriate for studying service-oriented technologies and management? What value will a service science and business process modeling offer to the firms that adopt them? And, how can these approaches be implemented so as to address the major challenges that organizations face with technology, information and strategy? We contribute new knowledge in this area by tying the economics and information technology strategy perspectives to the semantic and design science perspectives for a broader audience. Usually the more technical perspective is offered on a standalone basis, and confined to the systems space – even when the discussion is about business processes. This article also offers insights on these issues from the multiple perspectives of industry and academic thought leaders.     

CSDPL—一种基于CMM的软件过程定义语言

软件过程是人和计算机化的工具交互完成的可能持续长时间的复杂实体。软件过程比商业过程自动化程度要低,因为需要更多的人的参与和软件工具的支持,也有更多不断持续改进的需求。软件过程首先要建模,因此建模语言扮演了一个非常关键的角色。从管理的角度出发,CMM提出了一个软件过程概念框架。既要支持软件过程语言的要求的特性,又要支持CMM,基于CMM的软件过程定义语言必须把这个一般性和特殊性的要求结合起来。本文描述的软件过程定义语言CSPDL采用了图形和XML文本相结合的表示方式。同时,软件过程定义工具是支持建模的必需的支持。要尽量地支持软件过程语言的特性,还需要很多工作要做。     

Complexity metrics for DMN decision models

Complexity impairs the maintainability and understandability of conceptual models. Complexity metrics have been used in software engineering and business process management (BPM) to capture the degree of complexity of conceptual models. The recent introduction of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard provides opportunities to shift towards the Separation of Concerns paradigm when it comes to modelling processes and decisions. However, unlike for processes, no studies exist that address the representational complexity of DMN decision models. In this paper, we provide an initial set of complexity metrics for DMN models. We gather insights from the process modelling and software engineering fields to propose complexity metrics for DMN decision models. Additionally, we provide an empirical complexity assessment of DMN decision models. For the decision requirements level of the DMN standard 19 metrics were proposed, while 7 metrics were put forward for the decision logic level. For decision requirements, the model size-based metrics, the Durfee Square Metric (DSM) and the Perfect Square Metric (PSM) prove to be the most suitable. For the decision logic level of DMN the Hit Policy Usage (HPU) and the Total Number of Input Variables (TNIV) were evaluated as suitable for measuring DMN decision table complexity.     

Synthesizing Service Composition Models on the Basis of Temporal Business Rules

Transformational approaches to generating design and implementation models from requirements can bring effectiveness and quality to software development. In this paper we present a framework and associated techniques to generate the process model of a service composition from a set of temporal business rules. Dedicated techniques including path-finding,branching structure identification and parallel structure identification are used for semi-automatically synthesizing the process model from the semantics-equivalent Finite State Automata of the rules. These process models naturally satisfy the prescribed behavioral constraints of the rules. With the domain knowledge encoded in the temporal business rules,an executable service composition program,e.g.,a BPEL program,can be further generated from the process models. A running example in the e-business domain is used for illustrating our approach throughout this paper.     

From Contracts to E-Contracts: Modeling and Enactment

Contracts are complex to understand, represent and process electronically. Usually, contracts involve various entities such as parties, activities and clauses. An e-contract is a contract modeled, specified, executed and enacted (controlled and monitored) by a software system (such as a workflow system). Workflows are used to automate business processes that govern adherence to the e-contracts. E-contracts can be mapped to inter-related workflows, which have to be specified carefully to satisfy the contract requirements. Most workflow models do not have the capabilities to handle complex inter/intra relationships among entities in e-contracts. An e-contract does not adhere to activity/task oriented workflow processes, thus generating a gap between a conceptual model of e-contract and workflow. In this paper, we describe conceptual modeling of e-contracts and present a business process model for e-contract enactment. The enactment of e-contracts necessitates dynamic generation and initiation of workflows during the e-contract execution, besides the static workflows. ER^EC business process model facilitates an integrated approach to e-contracts enactment. Our methodology is illustrated by means of a case study conducted using Financial Messaging Solution contract for banking transactions.