Business Process Management Standards Tutorial
Description
PDF download: http://bpm07.fit.qut.edu.au/program/slides/Thursday/Thursday-Tutorials/Muehlen.pdf
Audio recording:
http://bpm07.fit.qut.edu.au/program/audio/Thursday/Tutorials/zurMuehlen.jsp
This Tutorial on BPM standards was delivered at the 5th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2007) in Brisbane Australia, August 2007, by Michael zur Muehlen (mzurmuehlen@stevens.edu)
Transcript
Business Process Management Standards Origin, Overview, and Directions
- Michael zur Muehlen, Ph.D.
- Center of Excellence in Business Process Innovation
- Howe School of Technology Management
- Stevens Institute of Technology
- Hoboken NJ
- [email_address]
- Private university, founded 1870
- 1800 undergraduate, 2600 graduate students
- Located in Hoboken, NJ (across the Hudson from Manhattan)
- Three Schools
- Technology Management
- Engineering
- Arts & Sciences
- Rankings:
- Top 5 technology management program, on par with Stanford, MIT, CMU, Babson (Optimize Magazine)
- #1 for best distance learning program (Princeton Review)
- Top 25 for most connected Campus (Sloan Foundation)
- http://www.stevens.edu
- Offers MBA in Technology Management, Master of Science (IS, Telecom Mgmt, Mgmt, EMTM), Bachelor’s Degree (Business & Technology)
- Programs taught on campus and off-site in corporate locations
- Clients: ADP, Avaya, BASF, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chubb, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, J&J, Lockheed, Merrill Lynch, PaineWebber, Pearson, Prudential, PSE&G, UBS, UPS, Verizon and others
- Research centers with focus on
- Process Management
- Project Management
- Product Innovation
- http://howe.stevens.edu
- Background
- Standardization Venues
- Current Standardization Efforts
- Industry Directions
- Research Around Standards
- Web Services/SOA idea: Plug & Play applications on top of a standardized infrastructure
- Impact of Standards is potentially large
- Standards making is risky: Choosing the wrong technology may be counterproductive, incompatible, and lead to lack of adoption
- Standards adoption is risky: Choosing the wrong standard may obstruct technology upgrade paths, limit business partner connectivity, and force resource training in (obsolete) technology
- Lack of understanding how the standardization process really works
- Technical Standard: Agreed upon specification for a way of communicating or performing actions.
- Internet Standard: Protocols through which people and programs interact over the Internet.
- Built on top of TCP/IP, and mostly HTTP
- Use of Internet Standards is discretionary:
- For developers: Direct choice of which standard to implement
- For customers: Indirect choice of which standards-compliant product to use
- User’s vote with their feet, developers with their hands
- Who initiates standards?
- Government-sanctioned standardization (e.g. COSO / SOX)
- User-initiated standardization (typically vertical)
- Vendor-initiated standardization (often horizontal)
- Developer-initiated standardization (e.g. first IETF RFPs)
- When does a specification emerge?
- Industry practice: Develop 80% of specification outside, then submit
- Rare: Define charter, then seek out ideas
- Unsolicited (IETF) vs. solicited (OMG) specifications
- Rules of the organization
- Strict procedural and voting rules
- Loose cooperation
- Virtual vs. physical meetings
- Outside input
- Openly available drafts vs. closed sessions
- Invited experts
- Other standards groups
- Implementation before ratification
- Votes
- Microsoft OOXML case
- Participating vs. voting organizations
- Role of the advisory board/steering committee
- Form of the specification
- Recommendation
- Request for Comments
- Standard
- Validity of the specification
- Adoption by submitters
- Adoption by other companies
- Adoption by open source community
- Mandatory vs. recommended standards
- Check-list compliance vs. usable implementation
- Use of standards-compliant products by end users
- Presence in the market place
- “Management by Magazine”
- 1995
- 1 standardization group for workflow
- Reference model + 5 interface standards
- Size of the average specification ~40 pages
- 2007
- 10+ working groups with interest in BPM
- 7+ standards for process models alone
- Size of the average specification ~150 pages
- OMG: Model-driven Architecture
- Goal: Specify applications starting with a model of the business context, generate running code from the models
- Components in place: OMA, UML, CORBA
- Next step: Business Process Definition Meta Model
- BPM Experience: CORBA Workflow Facility, BPMN, BPDM
- W3C: Web Architecture
- Goal: Provide protocol stack for application integration over TCP/IP and HTTP
- Components in place: SOAP, WSDL, XML
- Next step: Web Services Choreography
- BPM Experience: none
- OASIS: XML-centric standards
- Goal: Provide transparent venue for standards that can be used by both vertical and horizontal interest groups
- Components in place: ebXML, BPEL
- Next step: updated ebXML components, ASAP, WS Resource Model
- BPM Experience: workgroup-specific
- WfMC: Life-Cycle View of BPM
- Goal: Provide integration standards for different phases of the BPM lifecycle
- Components in place: Reference model, XPDL, Wf-XML
- Next step: Evolve XPDL
- BPM Experience: “Grandfathers” of BPM
- Black Forest Group Charter
- First meetings in 1993
- Driven by IBM, FileNet, Staffware
- Reference Model
- Glossary
- Interface Specifications
- Mainly cosmetic changes
- New symbol for Multiple Event and Gateway (used to be star, now pentagram)
- New Signal Event
- Separation of “catching” and “throwing” events
- Designed to supplement BPMN with a formal metamodel of its modeling constructs
- BPMN 1.0 did not contain a formal metamodel specification
- OMG mindset of MDA is based on multiple levels of metamodels
- BPDM replaces efforts to create a UML profile for BPMN
- BPDM contains more constructs than BPMN 1.0/1.1
- Mapping to MOF and XMI
- Envisioned to become persistency format for BPMN
- BPMN 2.0 = BPMN + BPDM + possibly other notations
- There may be a UML profile for BPDM
- Semantics of Business, Vocabulary and Rules
- Formally defined taxonomy to describe elementary business operations and rules
- Metamodel expressed in UML
- Business-level specification aims at enterprises to formally express their operations
- Allow tools to exchange process models between
- components in a Workflow/BPM Products
- different BPM/Workflow Products
- Process Modeling / Simulation tools and BPM/Workflow Products
- Implemented by commercial products
- Full support for BPMN 1.0 in XPDL 2.0
- Interoperability demonstrated at public events
- Support in the Open Source Community
- BPEL is an “executable” language
- Includes only executable operations
- Does not contain the graphical diagram
- Many Engines have proprietary formats
- They have a design tool
- Some BPEL engines have proprietary extensions
- It is typically not possible to design a process with a tool from one vendor and execute it in another vendor’s engine
- But exchange between design tools is possible
- Source: Agrawal et al. (2007)
- Also known as ebXML Business Process Specification Schema(BPSS)
- V 2.0.4 released in December 2006
- Complements ebXML document definitions, Collaboration Partner Protocols, and Collaboration Partner Agreements
- Interoperability Sematics for Cross-System Business Processes
- Successor to Simple Workflow Access Protocol (SWAP)
- Based on Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP)
- REST-style Interaction with externally hosted processes (Wf-XML) or long-running services (ASAP)
- Consider a process where three activities need to be performed.
- But …
- The workflow system does not do the work! It only coordinates the work of others.
- And ..
- The workflow system did not initiate the process, it is merely performing in response
- The BPMS acts as an intermediary
- Complete process can be controlled through standardized interfaces
- Process can control activities through standardized interfaces
- Exchange format for Business Rules (Production Rules)
- Defined by Fair Isaac & Co and ILOG
- Current revision submitted 09/03/2007
- PRR Core defines basic metamodel
- PRR OCL defines conditions and actions
- Taxonomy to specify goals and objectives of organizational activities and structures
- Targeted at business users rather than technical personnel
- Provides a vocabulary around goals, means, ends, influencers and related concepts
- Intention: To clarify the reasons underlying organizational design decisions
- Status: OMG Adopted Specification (dtc/2006-07-01)
- Michael zur Muehlen, Ph.D.
- Center of Excellence in Business Process Innovation
- Howe School of Technology Management
- Stevens Institute of Technology
- Hoboken NJ
- [email_address]
- Built as a unit, Internals not visible
- User Interface built in for all functions
- In order to “extend” to a new function, need to call in a programmer...
- Business Retains Control of
- Assignment of Responsibility
- Groups, Roles, Skills
- Deadlines
- Alerts, Reminders, Escalations
- Order of Tasks
- Addition of Manual Tasks
- User Interface
- IT Retains Control of
- Computational Logic
- Data Representations
- Scalability / Performance
- Interoperability
- Master Data Management
- Michael zur Muehlen, Ph.D.
- Center of Excellence in Business Process Innovation
- Howe School of Technology Management
- Stevens Institute of Technology
- Hoboken NJ
- [email_address]
- We have tried (unsuccessfully) for more than 12 years to standardize how to coordinate business processes across the Internet. Why are these standards missing?
- Individual standard makers are joining, leaving, and generally moving between different standards bodies in sometime random seeming paths
- Commercial interest is often deliberately silenced in the development of standards
- The prevailing economic models of standard making insufficiently explain the behavior we witnessed
- How can we explain the observed phenomena during the standard making process?
- Longitudinal Case Study based on public and restricted archival data and participation in standards venues
- Detailed Case Analysis of selected Vignettes
- IETF Case
- W3C Case
- Collected observations (events, incidents, significant behavior) from cases (a la process theory)
- Evaluated significant observations both from an economic and an ecological perspective
- Documented results as conjectures and testing strategies for further work
- Extracted participant information from public and members-only standards documents
- Protocols from standards meetings 1993-2006
- Standards documents
- Call sheets
- Gathered insight through participation
- Went to 20+ standards meetings
- Participated in numerous phone conferences
- Multiple supplementary interviews (in person and via email)
- Standards authors
- Standards bodies representatives
- Contemporary witnesses
- Standardization is not standardized
- No dominant standards organization that regulates Internet standards (W3C, IETF, OMG, OASIS etc.)
- No common set of procedures across different standards bodies (bylaws)
- Large areas of domain overlap (both vertically and horizontally)
- Government-sanctioned standards organizations often fail, losing power to market consortia [Schoechle 2003]
- Cultural clash between design culture striving for “good” architecture and commercial culture striving for quick marketability [Monteiro 1998, zur Muehlen et al. 2005]
- The “right” standards body lends legitimacy to an idea [compare Barley and Tolbert 1987]
- Theme: Death of a Standards Group
- WfMC members tried to start an IETF working group around process integration
- IETF bylaws allow for 2 birds-of-a-feathers meeting
- Minutes of the second meeting:
- Informal poll: who wants to work on that (very few); something else (slightly more); Lisa Li[ppert] asked if everyone else here was to prevent a WG forming (larger still, but still a minority).
- Established IETF members did not condone what they perceived as “Marketing Garbage” – Working Group did not form
- Theme: Maintaining the Values of an Institution
- W3C tried to change its IP licensing schema to RAND licensing
- More than 2,000 individuals commented on the proposed change
- The policy would discriminate against the poor
- The policy undermines the “Spirit of the Web”
- The policy would be self-defeating for W3C
- The proposal is a conspiracy
- The committee reversed their position and produced a Royalty-Free proposal
- Standards Bodies are not Companies
- They can organize around ideologies
- Identity = ideology (beliefs) + legitimacy
- Competition forces legitimacy
- Standards Bodies are Forums for Design Ideas
- Individual contributions shape specifications
- Specifications shape attitudes
- “ Thought Collectives” reject outside ideas
- Working Groups are born, merge, and die
- If similar groups exist, new groups emerge easier
- Resources are finite
- Competition affects cloning
- Phenomena supporting an ecological perspective:
- The birth, merger, and death of standards institutions
- The creation and survival of institutions depending largely on their legitimacy
- Individual actions shaping and shaped by the institutions
- Institutional inertia obstructing rapid institutional change and affecting the movement of ideas
- Phenomena supporting an economical perspective:
- Standards participants joining standards bodies, competing or cooperating based on their perception of market share and market size, their technological competence and their assets
- Working groups in Internet standard making function as a population ecology
- Test: Apply Hannan and Freeman’s techniques to the formation of Working Groups at W3C, IETF etc.
- Standard makers function as part of an interactional field, in which their actions are interdependent with those of other standard makers
- Test: Sequence analysis of standard makers
- The bylaws of the standard making bodies are the source of institutional stability in Internet standard making
- Test: Study relationship between changes to bylaws and working group formation and dissolution