Our CASCON 2010 Workshop Schedule is Available - "Effective Collaboration and Consistency Management in BPM"

The workshop will take place on Wednesday, November 3, 2010, in Markham, Ontario, Canada Registration for CASCON and the workshop is free! If you want to attend, please register via the CASCON website.

Schedule
08:30--08:45 Introduction by Krzysztof Czarnecki, University of Waterloo
08:45--09:10 "Maintaining Consistency Across BPM Initiatives' Content: People, Tools, and Outputs." Peter Braun, Bank of America
09:10--09:35 "Sharing the Experience of Adopting BPM: Reflections for Better Solutions." Moises Branco, University of Waterloo
09:35--10:00 "Why Applying Workflow Patterns is Hard." Janette Wong, consultant
10:00--10:30 Break
10:30--10:55 "Process Model Change Management." Jochen Kuester, IBM Research, Zurich
10:55--11:20 "Iterative Development in BPM Applications Using Traceability." Sebastian Carbajales, IBM Toronto Software Lab
11:20--12:00 Open Circle Panel, with speaker and audience participation

Abstracts and Speakers

Introduction, Krzysztof Czarnecki
This half-day workshop features an exciting line-up of experts, who will share their perspectives on business process management (BPM) and modeling (BPMo), including those of customers, consultants, tool builders, and researchers. The first three talks focus on the challenges of BPM in practice. The second part of the workshop features two talks on latest research and technology in business process consistency management across business, IT, and runtime environments. To set the stage for the rest of the morning, I will give a brief overview of BPM, with particular emphasis on collaboration and integration. We will close the workshop with an Open Circle Panel, giving the audience and the speakers an opportunity to discuss open questions and future directions.
Krzysztof Czarnecki is an Associate Professor and an NSERC/Scotiabank Industrial Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, where he leads the Generative Software Development Lab. His research area is model-based engineering of complex software-intensive systems.

Maintaining Consistency Across BPM Initiatives' Content: People, Tools, and Outputs, Peter Braun, Bank of America
Business Process Modeling (BPMo) is a collaborative task involving different groups of specialists including business analysts, solution architects and system developers. They work on different levels of abstraction and collaborate to create a set of different but related artifacts, from business requirements and high-level process specifications to executable models. A critical activity in BPMo is managing consistency among these artifacts. Successful consistency management requires understanding the key needs and collaboration patterns of the stakeholders and the complex relations among the artifacts. This discussion seeks to identify some of the key focus areas that must be considered in order to ensure consistency.
Peter Braun is a member of Bank of America's Business Process Modeling Center of Capability (BPMo CoC), which provides centralized, expert BPMo practitioners to develop and support Global Commercial, Corporate and Investment Banking Technology's BPMo program in the areas of modeling and simulation for key initiatives, model management, and model governance / compliance with modeling standards. He has been with Bank of America for 15 years in numerous capacities.

Sharing the Experience of Adopting BPM: Reflections for Better Solutions, Moises Branco, University of Waterloo
Adopting Business Process Modeling (BPMo) is a complex task, requiring considerable investments in tools, infrastructure, training and work processes. The success of BPMo is highly dependent on the close interaction between IT and business units, and many technical and non-technical factors affect the effectiveness of this interaction. In this talk, I will share my experience in the adoption of BPMo technology in a highly heterogeneous IT infrastructure, offering some ideas for improving the status quo of BPMo technology.
Moises Castelo Branco has a master’s degree in computer science and he is currently a PhD student working in Generative Software Development Lab, at University of Waterloo. Previously, he served in industry for 16 years playing numerous software engineering roles, including managing an IT architecture department at BNB, a major public bank in Brazil. At BNB, he had the opportunity to lead the adoption of a SOA/BPM infrastructure and participate in the implementation of the first two projects using the infrastructure. His research focuses on consistency management of BPM artifacts, including traceability and impact analysis among models that target different levels of abstraction, ranging from requirements to execution.

Why Applying Workflow Patterns is Hard, Janette Wong, consultant
Workflow Patterns is not a new topic. Research on capturing, abstracting, and documenting workflow patterns has been conducted for more than ten years. In fact, not surprisingly, the definition of patterns itself being "a named solution to a recurring problem in a context" requires that the patterns be observed and already present in existing systems. Some patterns, especially the simpler ones, are supported by process modeling languages and tools. Others, equally useful although more complicated, continue to be difficult to apply. Why is that the case? In this talk, I will explore some of the hurdles in applying patterns, illustrated using an example.
Janette Wong currently works as a consulting Workflow Solution Architect. Prior to her consulting role, Janette has had several years of experiences in BPMo development, focusing primarily on the use of patterns in BPMo.

Process Model Change Management, Jochen Kuester, IBM Research, Zurich
Process models are a key artifact when designing and implementing modern enterprise applications. Process model change management is required to allow multiple users to work with models simultaneously. In this talk, we present the main concepts of our approach to process model change management, which is based on compound operations and a process structure tree.
Jochen Malte Kuester studied Computer Science with Mathematics at University of Paderborn, Germany, with stays at University College London, UK, and Carleton University, Canada. He received the degree of Diplom-Informatiker from University of Paderborn in 2000 and his doctoral degree in March 2004 for a dissertation on Consistency Management of Object-Oriented Behavioral Models. Since July 2004, Dr. Kuester is employed by IBM Research in Rueschlikon, Switzerland. His research interest include consistency management, model transformations, business process modeling and model-driven development of service-oriented applications.

Iterative Development in BPM Applications Using Traceability, Sebastian Carbajales, IBM Toronto Software Lab
Business process management (BPM) involves the modeling of business processes, which are implemented and deployed in a runtime environment. The IT and enterprise view of these processes may be different due to implementation concerns such as performance, deployment topology, and runtime limitations. As business environments change over time, process models need to be updated to reflect changes in the operating environment causing a ripple effect in the IT implementation of the models. This talk demonstrates the capabilities of IBM to support iterative development in BPM applications using a traceability approach.
Sebastian Carbajales is a technical lead in the WebSphere BPM tooling team at the IBM Toronto Software Lab. During the last several years he has been involved in the design and implementation of compare/merge capabilities that enable iterative development within and across the WebSphere tooling products.

The workshop page can be found at:
https://www-927.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/listWorkshops.shtml

The registrations can be made at:
https://www-927.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/