WP-JRA-2.1

PO-JRA-2.1.1 State-of-the-art survey on business process modelling and Management — by Andreas Metzger — last modified May 19, 2009 10:10

In its simplest form, Business Process Management (BPM) is a suite of software technologies focusing on the management of the complete lifecycle of a business process. To date, most BPM deployments have been narrow in scope, adopting an organization-centric view and providing only improvements in specific business functions. As a result, current BPM suites only enable organizations to enhance their existing processes. The next-generation of service-enabled BPM will serve as a means of developing mission-critical applications based on strategic technology capable of creating and executing crossenterprise collaborative business processes and business-aware transactions, so that organizations can deploy, monitor, and continuously update cross-enterprise functions within a mixed environment of people, content, and systems. Such collaborative, complex end-to-end service interactions give raise to the concept of Agile Service Networks. In this report, we assess the state-of-the-art in BPM, surveying the basic concepts, describe the features, techniques and enabling technologies necessary for making BPM a reality and explain the need for service-based BPM. The report also highlights the need for moving from a relatively static and organization-centric view of BPM to a much more dynamic, highvalue one based on Agile Service Networks.

CD-JRA-2.1.2 Initial Models and Mechanisms for Quantitative Analysis of Correlations Between KPIs, SLAs and Underlying Business Processes — by Benedikt Liegener — last modified May 19, 2009 10:10

In this deliverable we present initial models and mechanisms for quantitative analysis of correlations between KPIs, SLAs and underlying business processes. We use service network (SN) models for quantitative analysis based on KPIs and SLAs, which enables strategic decisions for participants such as determination of optimal product prices or outsourcing decisions. In order to perform the analysis on the SN abstraction level and implement its results in operational business processes, SNs have to be connected to the BPM stack. We therefore introduce the SN4BPM architecture describing an enhanced BPM layering and lifecycle where SNs constitute a separate layer on top of the established BPM stack. In that context, we describe in particular a model-driven approach to generating abstract business process models from Service Network Models and vice versa. Finally, we deal with monitoring in the cross-organizational setting of service networks.

CD-JRA-2.1.3 Business Transaction Language — by Osama Sammodi — last modified May 17, 2010 16:07

Application integration remains one of the core drivers of innovation in service engineering. Application integration serves as a means of developing service-enabled applications based on strategic technology capable of creating and successfully executing end-to-end business processes. The trend will be to move from relatively stable, organization-specific applications to integrated, dynamic, high-value ones where process interactions and trends are examined closely to understand more accurately application needs and dynamics. Such collaborative, complex end-to-end process interactions give rise to the concept of Service Networks (SNs) (see PO-JRA-2.1.1 & PO-JRA-2.1.2). This deliverable targets the concept of a business transaction and explores how transactional processes and process fragments fit in the context of a running scenario which deals with end-to-end processes in a service network that possess transaction properties. Conventional (ACID) and unconventional (application-based) types of atomicity are introduced, including contract, payment and delivery atomicity, in the frame of a business transaction model. The transaction model provides a comprehensive set of concepts and several standard primitives and conventions that can be utilized to develop complex Service-Based Applications (SBAs) involving transactional process fragments