The 11th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering Heidelberg, Germany June 14-18, 1999 Amit Sheth Amit Sheth in collaboration with in collaboration with Wil van der Aalst Wil van der Aalst I. Budak Arpinar I. Budak Arpinar T. Lima and METEOR team T. Lima and METEOR team Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab. University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu SABPM Workshop SABPM Workshop Keynote Keynote
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Processes in the Networked Economies: Portal, Vortex, and Dynamic Trading Processes
Amit Sheth, Keynote at the Software Architectures for Business Process Management (SABPM'99) Workshop at CAiSE *99, Heidelberg, June 1999.
Processes will be chief differentiating and the competitive force indoing business in the networked economy. They will be deeply integrated with the way of doing business, and that they will be critical components of almost all types of systems supporting enterprise-level and business critical activities.
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The 11th Conference on AdvancedInformation Systems EngineeringHeidelberg, Germany June 14-18, 1999
Amit ShethAmit Sheth
in collaboration within collaboration withWil van der AalstWil van der AalstI. Budak ArpinarI. Budak Arpinar
T. Lima and METEOR teamT. Lima and METEOR team
Large Scale DistributedInformation Systems Lab.
University of GeorgiaAthens, GA, USA
http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu
SABPM WorkshopSABPM WorkshopKeynoteKeynote
IntroductionIntroduction
• Challenges and OpportunitiesChallenges and Opportunities
• Current Status: what do we lack now?Current Status: what do we lack now?
A Critical Role ProcessA Critical Role ProcessTechnology Can PlayTechnology Can Play
• Two of the most critical success factors
customer acquisition and retention,
providing value added features and bundled
services.
Solutions support these two compelling needs invariably
lead to the need for interorganizational workflow processes
because customers prefer to deal with a single service provider,
and most high-value services require integration of what
different types of providers have to offer. Today’s data-centric Today’s data-centric
solutions are inadequate and inappropriate.solutions are inadequate and inappropriate.
Current Status:Current Status:•what has been industry’s approach what has been industry’s approach
to providing workflow solutions? to providing workflow solutions?
•what are researcher doing?what are researcher doing?
•what do we lack now?what do we lack now?
Key conclusion from Doculab’sKey conclusion from Doculab’sworkflow product comparison studyworkflow product comparison study
Products that allow development of complex
applications, provide flexibility and support
integration are very hard to use, take too long
and require experience programmers (and are
still not quite comprehensive)
Easy to use products are too restrictive –
and are useful for small or standard
applications only
METEOR EAppS’s objective has been to avoid significant compromise.
Slightly oversimplified observation onSlightly oversimplified observation on state of the art in Workflow Technology state of the art in Workflow Technology
• Internet: the source of value moves from physical products to digital products.
• Custom point-to-point integration between every buyer and supplier is impractical: transform supply chains into open and interoperable marketplaces.
Most of the available marketplaces do not have enough facilities
to automate complex business processes. In this respect,
workflow systems should be exploited to model buying
and/or selling processes.
Architecture for ManagingArchitecture for ManagingBusiness ProcessesBusiness Processes
• Depending on how various stake holders – the
consumers, the intermediaries, and the
suppliers interact, and how the capability of
managing business processes is realized, we
offer architectures for managing business
processes
– process portal,
– process vortex,
– dynamically trading processes.
Process PortalProcess Portal
Portal
Enterprise A
Buyer
Intra-enterpriseBusinessProcesses
Cross-enterpriseBusiness Processes
WWW Catalogue
Enterprise B
WWW Catalogue
Enterprise C
Process PortalProcess Portal
• One-stop shopping for products or information
• Peer-to-peer interactions
• A portal is responsible for carrying out a majority
of activities using the data it has and the
transactions it supports.
• Predefined, (relatively) static business processes
A key characteristic of a portal is to own or
manage much of the data and information
it needs to meet its customers needs.
Process VortexProcess Vortex
W W W C a ta lo g u e
D o c u m e n t E x c h a n g e
C o n te n t M a n a g e m e n t & In te g ra t io n
B u s in e s s S e rv ic e s
T ra d in g P a r tn e r R e g is t ry
E n te r p r is e BV o r te x M a r k e tp la c e -1
B u y
S e l l /B u y
S e l lS e l l
S e l l /B u y
B u y
E n te r p r is e A
E n te r p r is e C
D o c u m e n t E x c h a n g e
C o n te n t M a n a g e m e n t & In te g r a t io n
B u s in e s s S e r v ic e s
T r a d in g P a r tn e r R e g is t r y
W W W C a ta lo g u e
D o c u m e n t E x c h a n g e
C o n te n t M a n a g e m e n t & In te g r a t io n
B u s in e s s S e r v ic e s
T r a d in g P a r tn e r R e g is t r y
W W W C a ta lo g u e
V o r te x M a r k e tp la c e -2
Process VortexProcess Vortex
• Interactions among buyers and sellers occur
through governed marketplaces
• They focus on very specific product lines
• Predefined business processes
• Single interface to catalogues and supplier
aggregation
Telecommunications industry: service provider needs to support
different classes of customers (e.g., individual residences, small
businesses, and large businesses) and require flexibility to deal
with a limited set of partners. For example, a CLEC may need
flexibility in leasing network capacities for long distance services
from QWEST communications or Level 3 communications.
Virtual Business ProcessesVirtual Business Processes
• A virtual business process of a virtual enterprise, also referred as interorganizational workflow, goes beyond a single enterprise boundary and it is constructed by combining the services provided by different companies
which are collectively called a trading community.
• Some of the fundamental issues that need to be addressed to implement a virtual enterprise are:
How to provide a mechanism whereby companies can advertise their services, other companies can look at them and, finally, incorporate these services into their own business process?
How to execute a virtual process spawning several enterprises without being managed by one physical enterprise?
• Based on the needs and preferences of a customer, a virtual process is constructed on the fly to meet this very particular demand of the customer.
• Participants are a group of semi-autonomous or
autonomous organizations that need to cooperate.
Telecommunications industry: one of the visions of the future networks
includes the facility to allow consumer devices to interact with other devices
and humans on the network in an integrated fashion. The device may be
able to specify a need for a specific type and quality of network services
required and the network dynamically composes a customized process to
allow processing of the request.
Technical ChallengesTechnical Challenges
Technical ChallengesTechnical Challenges
• Modeling and Design
• Analysis
• Enactment Services
• Interoperability
• Adaptability
Open Issues for modeling Open Issues for modeling interorganizational workflowsinterorganizational workflows
Integration of
• Organization modeling(e.g., in the networked economy, workflow processes will cross organizational boundaries and these boundaries will become fluid and subject to continuous change)
• Security Modeling
• Data Modeling
Open Issues for Analysis of WorkflowsOpen Issues for Analysis of Workflows
• None of the commercially available WFMSs offers verification capabilities, which go beyond trivial checks such as the absence of an initial task or input condition.
• In most WFMSs it is possible to model the synchronization (i.e., AND-join) of two alternative paths (i.e., two paths starting with an OR-split) without any warning at design time: at run-time such a construct will inevitably result in deadlocks.
• Research efforts should aim at simulation facilities.
Open Issues for Workflow EnactmentOpen Issues for Workflow Enactment
• Significant additional research and serious engineering efforts are needed to improve scalability, exception handling, automatic recovery, and other QoS criteria.
• Building all the capabilities from scratch within a workflow system without using any state-of-the-art supporting tools is not an easy task:– Iona Technology’s OrbixOTM 3.0 with Java and security
support for E-commerce applications,
– BEA’s M3 system.
• Agent-based workflow management systems still have a long path ahead before they will effectively address QoS issues.
Open Issues for Workflow InteroperabilityOpen Issues for Workflow Interoperability
• Only concrete implementations of standards (e.g., SWAP{, jFLOW) can provide real feedback for the improvement of such interoperability standards.
– Need to go beyond their capabilities (Sync nodes in METEOR).
• The interoperability solutions need to evolve towards multi-protocol and more heterogeneous middleware environments.
• The current interoperability specifications do not support organizational aspects in any significant way.
Open Issues for AdaptabilityOpen Issues for Adaptability
• If cases need to be transferred from an existing
process definition to a new process definition,
the use of a replication or a versioning mechanism
will not suffice.
• The term ‘dynamic change’ refers to the problem
of handling old cases in a new workflow process
definition.
How to transfer cases to a new version of the process?
New concepts and techniques are needed to avoid
anomalies caused by the dynamic change problem.
SummarySummary
• In the networked economy characterized by speed and distribution of both technological progress and business activities, an organic process technology will provide an integration fabric as well as key differentiator.
• Our view:
– Much of the future innovations as well as commercial activities will come about by the process technology as part of other key products and solutions, such as in EAI and E-commerce markets, that will power networked enterprises.
– On technology side, coordination, collaboration and information systems will continued to come closer to develop a new class of technology.
Additional InformationAdditional Information
RIDE’99 Proceedeings
Dogac et al NATO ASI Proceedings
A.P. Sheth, W.M.P. van der Aalst, and I.B. Arpinar
Processes Driving the Networked Economy:Process Portals, Process Vortexes, and Dynamically