Business Modelling Guide Using Event Action Components

FIPA Interation Protocols provide an excellent example of "new semantic domain being defined": http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00028/SC00028H.html

Business provides a knowledge domain that is usefully constrained by the political, financial and legal entities in which a business operates.



Some links with the Petri Nets Pi-calculus Workflow BPM debate with Howard Smith and others

http://www.workflow-research.de/Forums/index.php?act=ST&f=10&t=28

http://www.looselycoupled.com/blog/2003_11_23_lc.htm#107015401001130588

http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/better_maths_better_processes.pdf

http://www.fairdene.com/picalculus/workflow-is-just-a-pi-process.pdf

http://blog.fivesight.com/prb/comments/2003-11-18

Pi Calculus - Mobile Computing - Mobile Calculi

Robin Milner Home Page - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rm135/
Luca Cardelli - http://www.luca.demon.co.uk/

Biocomputing

Computing based on biological models, like the circadian clock

fun nice to read ??

Time Factor: Simplicity and Relevance: Risk and Affordability - Google Churchill

Business Modelling standards proposed includes ebXML, BPL4WS and WSCI.

All business activity is defined by accounting limits - year and period based.

Activity can be seen as event based with humans interacting with systems, within an event framework that is concurrent. Asynchronous event modelling may have the power to provide us systems that are both simple, and relevant for the new "third wave" of processing (see Smith 2003, Information and Software Technology)

RULES
======

1. Time as a base factor

2. Concurrency a factor

3. Action is "independent" of owner of action

4. Owner of action is subject to characteristics, like authorisation

5. Action represents a transformation of data, from one state to another

6.

Software development may need to be component based, in order to make the product manageable and to fit in with the requirements of the business

Business "objects" are defined as follows:
1. by the legal entities of the rules of corporations, profit and loss statement, Value added tax report,
2. the internal management organisational and accounting objects: cost centres, work orders, sales orders
3. persons of particular skill and authority define audit and security objects

Modelling system development is the weaving together of the business objects into a framework that is defined by events and actions.

Layer 1 - Event and Action Layer - how events happen, what are the dependencies and consequences
Layer 2 - Object Layer - stable business entities which are used in the carrying out of the events and actions
Layer 3 - undefined?

An activity has the following characteristics:

1. It takes a period of time (not usually relevant though)
2. It is initiated by some "trigger" activities or events
3.

Domain Methodologies

DESIGN
object-oriented design

PROGRAMMING
object-oriented programming

ARCHITECTURES
Service-oriented architectures

SOAP, UDDI - Plumbing layer of web services

level of complexity requires a generalised architecture

SOAP is good but it is not enough.

Challenges:

Changing mindsets of developers
Define vision, policy and goals
Define process for how different roles work together
Define governance model

ebXML role: Registry

Is there a value in a registry? Example of UDDI.

ebXML includes a "repository" - business partner agreements, embedded database

Sourceforge and University of Hong Kong - Good Production Quality ebXML registry

Specifications completed in May 2001 -

Misperceptions:

"monolithic model"
"heavyweight"

"federated registry" = a registry for a group of companies

Choreography:
BPEL "execution language"at is Business Process Re-engineering?
b. Defining a business process
c. Why process-based change
d. Integrating re-engineering and systems design and development
e. Levels of process competency

Define Process Vision and Scope
a. Identifying process performance measures
b. Impact of a process architecture
c. Defining and understanding the importance of process boundaries
d. Documenting IGOE’s (input, Guide, Output & Enabler)
e. Techniques for defining and controlling project scope

Capturing Process Knowledge
a. Identify where the knowledge is
b. Importance of facilitation
c. Gather process information using appropriate techniques
d. Understand and categorize business rules

Modeling Current Process
a. What is a process model
b. Understanding process components
c. Establishing modeling standards
d. Documenting Input, Guide, Output and Enablers (IGOEs)
e. Determining roles and responsibilities

References:

2003 - Ed Julson - Sun Microsystems - SQL Summit

Web References:
http://www.dci.com/events/busmodl/