DSV Blog

Next week (26-29) October, I will present a contribution on the EDOC conference: http://edoc2010.inf.ufes.br/

Tomorrow I will present the paper Mot en processorienterad förvaltning (En. Towards a process oriented government*), by Gustaf and me, at Sundsvall 42 conference.

The paper summarizes our work at the OST (Open Social Services) project finances by Vinnova. It discusses the prototype we developed for the emergency phone application process and the full scale solution developed during the project.

The prototype can be downloaded from http://people.dsv.su.se/~petia/phone_demo_v_2.zip
A description of how to install and run the prototype is available here.
A movie from the prototype is available here.

The full scale solution is available at Järfälla’s web-site.(electronic identification is requested.)

Finally, the presentation for tomorrow is available here.

* The paper is written in Swedish. A related paper, presenting some of the results in English, is Business Process Management for Open E-Services in Local Government.

Detta är ett test för att se om det hela funkar.

Jag länkar till min vanliga hemsida

http://people.dsv.su.se/~hercules

The rapid development of the Internet during the last decade has supported enterprises in building novel infrastructures, setting up virtual organisations, and operating in larger geographical spaces. To manage this new environment, enterprises need to align their IT infrastructures to the business processes. Therefore, the interest in business process management using Process Aware Information Systems (PAIS) has been rapidly increasing. Solutions implemented in PAISs are often complex and time-consuming to develop. One way to address this problem is to utilize repositories of reusable process models. However, while repositories have proved to be successful within object-oriented and component-based development, similar success has not yet been achieved in the area of PAIS. This is because we still lack the critical mass of process models within a single repository and we lack transparency between different repositories. The main goal of this research is, therefore, to design the architecture of a universal process repository, i.e. a repository that is independent of process modelling languages, comprises a large number of existing process repositories, and is open for change and growth by any potential user. The long term goal of the research is to lay the foundations for a Business Process Management Wikipedia, which will become a universal knowledge resource on process models that can be used by researchers for empirical investigations in the business process management area.

Service engineering is an approach to the study, design and implementation of service systems in which specific constellations of organizations and technologies provide value for others in the form of electronic services.

Key to this approach is the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), a model that utilizes services as the basic computing unit to support development and composition of larger-granularity services in heterogeneous environments, which can in turn, support flexible business processes and applications that span organizations.

SOC heavily relies on the use of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), a logical way of designing a software system to provide services to either end-user applications or to other services distributed in a network, via published and discoverable interfaces. In the scope of SOA, services are autonomous computational entities that can be used in a platform independent way. Services can be described, published, discovered, and dynamically assembled.

SOA, built with Web services is gaining increasing use in electronic-based business interactions. Web services employ common Internet technologies enabling thus standards-based, infrastructure to be used.

So far, research and development of Web services has mainly focused on an operational perspective, such as the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. However, more important is the fact that Web services are used to expose valuable business functionality. In the long-run, Web services that do not support certain business values cannot be motivated. This fact is shifting lately the focus to large scale design of external e-services, within the context of economic value exchanges to the business level. These, high-level business services are further implemented using basic functions composed in the form of Web services in processes. Apprehending this as a core relation between high-level, business-centered services and low-level, technology-centered services, it becomes natural to develop systems from a higher level of abstraction, and leave particular technologies to handle tedious details of the low-level services.

Besides the need to handle the increased complexity in the form of numerous business actors and their value exchanges, there is also a need for a structured approach for software service design that merges the IT and business perspectives. A well-defined alignment of software and business values provides benefits for service requirement gathering, service design and service validation.

Current SYSLAB research within the area of the service engineering is focused on the identification and design of goal- and business-aligned e-services.