viernes, 27 de noviembre de 2009

The importance of Business Transactions: Business Services 2.0

My research partners, Joaquin Peña and Jose Bocanegra, are currently working on improve the modeling and implementation of business transactions, using MDD and SOC. Their contributions are in businessservices20.com

Business transactions are acquiring a special importance because provide an abstract view of the interactions that take place among organizations for the accomplishment of a business objective.

Although business transactions are seen as one of the key elements for making the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) vision a reality, we have discovered, through an initial review of the literature, that the proposals for the modelling of business transactions have a set of weakness that can be synthesized in the following two drawbacks: on the one hand, there is important information that business transactions models should expose to cover the information need from a economical and software point of view, but that is not taken into account in the proposed models, limiting its expressiveness. On the other hand, there is not a proposal for the automatic transformation of those models into an executable system.

CAISE 2010 paper available (under revision)

Yesterday, we have performed the submission of our paper: "A Methodological Framework for Obtaining the Core Architecture of Business Information Systems Families" to CAISE 2010.

Abstract: Nowadays large organizations are the result of the interrelation of many business units which tend to be managed based on its business processes. The development of the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that supports these organizations is a complex task, due to the existence of different versions of the same process, namely core process, tailored in terms of each unit that executes it. Thus, organizations lost the matching between each version and the original. It implies problems in the maintenance of process specifications, that drives to an inaccurate execution of the business strategies of the organization. The introduction of Software Product Lines (SPL) techniques into the development of Business Information Systems (BIS) is expected to become a new development paradigm, of what we call Business Families, maximizing reuse and dealing with variability on process definitions. Current SPL-based proposals do not solve the identified problems, because the proposed design of the reusable core specification is not performed in a systematic way that maintains its traceability with derived processes. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a methodological framework that taking into account the identified drawbacks makes feasible to obtain, systematically, the core architecture of a Business Information System Family, composed by the core process and the extra information needed to derive, systematically too, each version. We exemplify our approach with reference to a real-life E-Government case study.

BPM 2010 CfP


BPM'10 is the 8th Conference on Business Process Management and it is considered the most distinguished specialized forum for researchers in BPM.

We are referenced as a bibliography on new research projects

We are very proud to know that our article From Feature Models to Business Processes has been referenced in the recommended bibliography of proposed work: Modelagem de Variabilidade em Processos de Negócio at the University of Pernambuco by Carina Frota Alves