Requirements elicitation, writing, analysis, and modeling by IIBA Endorsed Education Provider.

Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures

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Mathias Weske

November 2007, Springer, Hardcover, 368 pages, ISBN 3540735216


How to Elicit (Gather), Write, and Analyze Business Requirements
How to Model, Analyze, and Improve Business Processes
How to Model, Analyze, and Improve Business Data
All About Use Cases
How to Test an Application using Business Requirements
Writing Effective Business Requirement Statements
How to Write Effective Business Requirements
	Try our new Virtual Workshops and e-Coaching for today's Business Analysts (BA's) and Subject Matter Experts (SME's)

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect for experts to handle, by contrast computer scientists often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Mathias Weske argues that the communities involved need to share a common understanding of the principles underlying business process management. To this end, he develops an overall picture that describes core BPM concepts and technologies and explains their relationships. This picture covers high-level business aspects like business goals, strategies, and value chains, but it concentrates on process modeling techniques and process enactment platforms, taking into account the different stakeholders involved.

After starting with a presentation of general foundations, process orchestrations and process choreographies are covered. Based on control flow patterns, concrete process languages are introduced in a concise manner, including Workflow nets, Event-driven Process Chains, Yet Another Workflow Language, and the Business Process Modeling Notation. The various stages during the design and implementation of process choreographies are discussed. Different soundness properties are investigated in a chapter on formal aspects of business processes. Finally, he investigates concrete architectures to enact business processes, including workflow management architectures, case handling architectures and service-oriented architectures. He also shows how standards like SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture.

This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. It is also valuable for project managers and IT professionals working in business process management, since it provides a vendor-independent view on the topic. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information, such as links to references that are available online, exercises that offer the reader a deeper involvement with the topics addressed, and additional teaching material.

Keywords:

Business Process Management
Enterprise Application Integration
Enterprise Modeling
Process Coreographies
Process Orchestrations
Service-Oriented Computing
Workflow Management

Part I Foundation
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1 Motivation and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Business Process Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 Classification of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.4 Goals, Structure, and Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2 Evolution of Enterprise Systems Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.1 Traditional Application Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.2 Enterprise Applications and their Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3 Enterprise Modelling and Process Orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.4 Workflow Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.5 Enterprise Services Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Part II Business Process Modelling
3 Business Process Modelling Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.1 Conceptual Model and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.2 Abstraction Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.3 From Business Functions to Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.4 Activity Models and Activity Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.5 Process Models and Process Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.6 Process Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.7 Modelling Process Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3.8 Modelling Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.9 Modelling Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
3.10 Business Process Flexibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
XII Contents
3.11 Architecture of Process Execution Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
4 Process Orchestrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
4.1 Control Flow Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
4.2 Petri Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
4.3 Event-driven Process Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
4.4 Workflow Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
4.5 Yet Another Workflow Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
4.6 Graph-Based Workflow Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
4.7 Business Process Modeling Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
5 Process Choreographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
5.1 Motivation and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
5.2 Development Phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
5.3 Process Choreography Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
5.4 Process Choreography Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
5.5 Service Interaction Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
5.6 Let’s Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
6 Properties of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
6.1 Data Dependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
6.2 Structural Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
6.3 Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
6.4 Relaxed Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
6.5 Weak Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
6.6 Lazy Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
6.7 Soundness Criteria Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
Part III Architectures and Methodologies
7 Business Process Management Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
7.1 Workflow Management Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
7.2 Flexible Workflow Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
7.3 Web Services and their Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
7.4 Advanced Service Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
7.5 Data-Driven Processes: Case Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
Contents XIII
8 Business Process Methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
8.1 Methodology Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
8.2 Strategy and Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
8.3 Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
8.4 Design Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
8.5 Platform Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
8.6 Implementation and Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
8.7 Operation and Controlling Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .