Our Workshop Effective Collaboration and Consistency Management in BPM has been accepted at the CASCON 2010

Business Process Modeling is a collaborative task of 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 BPM 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 workshop will bring researchers, industry specialists and tool vendors to discuss open issues and challenges on the topic.

Goals and Outcomes

The goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners from industry and academia to discuss challenges, open issues and requirements for an effective collaboration and consistency management in BPM, within and across different levels of abstraction. Relevant questions discussed included: How the different stakeholders involved in BPM collaborate and communicate? How to effectively use BPM tools to capture and communicate requirements in order to improve the accuracy of the communication? What are the key challenges of maintaining consistency of models across levels of abstraction? How are new business and technical requirements communicated and conflicts resolved? What practices can improve the collaboration? How BPM tools can be better equipped for collaboration and consistency management? What is the appropriate level of standardization of business specifications and other artifacts like textual descriptions? Which principles and guidelines are necessary to optimize the alignment of business and IT roles? What is the appropriate way to structure the business-to-IT relationship while keeping consistency and flexibility to allow the organization to quickly adapt to new changes?

Workshop Structure

This half-day workshop featured invited presentations from industry, academia and tool vendors and an open-circle discussion to engage the audience. The presentations covered a range of BPM stakeholder perspectives, including business analysts and system architects. The speaker list included representatives from Scotiabank, Bank of America, Charles Schwab, IBM Toronto Lab, and IBM Research Lab in Zurich. The open-circle discussion fostered the exchange of ideas among the invited speakers and the audience.

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/

Following the Workshop Schedule:

CASCON 2010 Workshop on "Effective Collaboration and Consistency Management in Business Process Modeling"

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

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.