PROPOSAL OF BPMN EXTENSIONS BASED ON RESULTS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSES OF PROCESS MODELLING METHODS
Transcript
PROPOSAL OF BPMN EXTENSIONS BASED ON RESULTS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSES OF PROCESS MODELLING METHODS Tomislav Rozman, Romana Vajde Horvat, Ivan Rozman Knowledge Management in Organizations Maribor 2006 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Maribor, Slovenia Institute of Informatics Contents of the article
- Knowledge modelling, process modelling
- Ontology
- Bunge-Wand-Weber’s ontology
- Ontology analysis (of process modelling methods)
- Proposal of extensions of BPMN notation
- Conclusion
Knowledge modelling
- Knowledge modelling is concerned with languages, tools and methodologies for developing abstract models of some target domain or problem solving behaviour.
- (Ontology modelling, object modelling, process modelling )
(Business) Process modelling
- Better: Discrete process modelling
- Plethora of methods, methodologies, notations,…
- Goal: to capture the knowledge how people (machines) perform their work (or, how we would like them to perform it)
- No silver bullet
- How to improve the completeness of process modelling methods?
Ontology
- … is a branch of philosophy , which deals with the modelling of real world (Wand and Weber, 1993)
- … is a catalogue of related terms among participants of specific domain, classified according to predefined rules
- The purpose: to improve and unify communication about domain
- Types: Informal, Formal, Axiomatic
- Bunge-Wand-Weber – general information systems ontology
- BPO (Business Management Ontology) – ontology for business processes
Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology
- Basic groups of concepts (Wand and Weber, 1993):
- Things (thing, composite thing, class, kind of, property),
- states (state, stable state, unstable state, lawful state space, conceivable state space, history),
- events and transformations (Event, external event, internal event, defined event, poorly defined event, process, conceivable event space, lawful event space, transformation, transformation law, acts-on and coupling),
- laws (natural law, human law, state law, transformation law) and
- system (system, system composition, system decomposition, environment, system structure, sub-system, leveled system structure).
Ontology analysis (what?)
- Matching of concepts between selected ontology and modelling language
Construct deficit Construct overload Construct redundancy Construct excess Ontology analysis (how?) (Rosemann, Green, and Indulska, 2004) Results of existing ontology analyses
- EPC (Recker et al, 2005) ,
- ARIS (Green and Rosemann, 2000) ,
- UML Activity diagrams (Dussart, Aubert, and Patry, 2002) ,
- OPM – Object Process Methodology (Soffer et al, 2001) ,
- BPMN – Business Process Modelling notation (Recker et al, 2005)
Ontologically most complete! BPMN notation
- Visual representation of (business) processes – workflow
- It defines graphical symbols and additional attributes for process description
- Covers the process modelling concepts and patterns very well
- Easy to learn
- Based on : EPC, Petri nets, Activity diagrams (UML)
- Defines the mapping to execution languages (XPDL, BPEL4WS)
- Merging with UML?
Proposals of BPMN extensions – what is missing
- Based on results of ontological analyses of completeness
- Missing: System structure concept
BPMN coverage ? ? ? System (Organization) Roles Processes Artifacts Proposals of BPMN extensions – overview
- System structure is a set of interactions between system components and/or between system and environment .
BPMN coverage Roles/relationships diagram Process map diagram Responsibilities diagram Process overview, Business goals and metrics Roles Processes Artifacts Concept: system
- System = { processes | roles | artifacts } or any combination
- Presented as ‘package’ (similar to UML:package)
Extension: Process structure ( process map )
- Set of processes and static relations among them
- Possible relations:
- P X depends on P Y
- P X is special case of P Y
- P X is a part of P Y
- P X replaces if P Y
- P X conforms to P Y
- P X is version of P Y
Example: process map Extension : Roles structure ( roles/relationships )
- Set of associated roles and groups of roles in organization or project
- Possible relations:
- R X is special kind of R Y
- R X collaborates in G X
- R X replaces R Y
- R X communicates with R Y
- R X supervises R Y
- R X default reporting channel R Y
Example: Roles/relationships Extension : Structure of processes and roles ( Responsibilites )
- Set of associated roles/groups and processes
- Possible relations
- R X is responsible for P X
- R X performs P X
- R X is informed about P X
- R X collaborates in P X
- R X audits P X
- R X supervises P X
- R X reports about P X
Example: Responsibilities Extension : Structure of processes and artifacts ( Process overview, Business goals/measures )
- Set of associated processes and artifacts
- Possible relations:
- P X conforms to A (standard)
- P X is measured with A (key performance indicator)
- P X fulfills A (business goal)
- P X outputs A
- P X inputs A
Examples: Process overview Examples: Business goals/measures Open issues
- BWW ontology: relevant?
- Ontology analyses: comparable results?
- Ontological deficiency of BPMN: states ?
- Other construct deficiencies: overload, redundancy, excess ?
Conclusions
- Complexity of conceptual models:
- completeness vs. understandability
- Ontology analysis is becoming mature approach for analysis of process modelling methods
- Usability of this extensions was tested on real world example : reengineering of business process
- Presented extensions of BPMN are part of process modelling methodology, developed at University of Maribor, Institute of informatics ( PRESY – PRocess EaSY methodology )
- Discussion…
F.A.Q
- Why Y.A.P.M. ? (Yet Another Process Modelling Method?)
- The needs : process models are not enough
- Based on engineering approach & best of existing methods
- Why not EPC+ARIS?
- (see table, ontological deficiencies)
- Studies show that users have difficulties to represent some concepts
- BPMN- most mature , up to date, mapping to executable languages , intended for business analysts and IT experts
- EEPC’s-too vague
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