1. Towards a Universal Business Process Model
Repository for Process Model Reuse
Mturi Elias
Supervisor: Paul Johannesson
Department of Computer and Systems Science (DSV),
Stockholm University (SU), Sweden
2. Agenda
1. Background and Motivation
2. Research Problem and Questions
3. Research Objectives
4. Research Process
5. Research Contribution
6. Conclusion and Future Research Directions
3. Background and Motivation
Increased adoption of BPM – increased economic pressure
One of the most important aspects of BPM is business
process modeling
Benefits of modeling business processes:
process improvement, understanding, communication, aligning
Business and IT, model-driven execution of processes,
performance measurement, process analysis and simulation,
knowledge management, change management
Besides these benefits, modeling is a complex, time
consuming and error prone task
Reuse of process models can reduce the cost, complexity
and time
4. Background and Motivation
One of the proven approach for supporting reuse is a
process models repository
The process model repository offers a space for
storing, maintaining and changing process knowledge for
future reuse.
5. Research Problem and Questions
Existing process model repositories have not yet succeeded in
being adopted to support process model reuse. Reasons includes
1. Most of existing repositories are proprietary—they are
not publicly open
2. It is difficult to search and navigate across repositories
because they follow different business and process
classification schemes.
3. The process models are not goal related, making it
difficult to get an understanding of what business goals
that are realized by a certain process model
4. Existing repositories have limited scope—they lack
completeness
6. Research Problem and Questions
How should a process model repository be designed
in order to support reuse of process models? More
specifically:
RQ1. What requirements should process model repository
possess in order to increase the probability of process model
reuse?
RQ2. What kind of information is required for describing
process models that should be included in the repository
structure to improve (1) searching process models (2)
navigation of a process model repository, and (3)
understandability of process models
RQ3. How can process models from different modeling
notations be stored in a process model repository?
7. Research Objectives
The main objective of this thesis is, therefore, to design
the architecture of a universal process model repository
Specific Objectives:
1. To elicit the requirements for a process model repository
2. To develop a model of business process metadata
3. To develop a common format (language independent) of
process description
9. Research Contribution
1. Requirements for a process model repository (paper 1)
2. A Business Process Metadata Model (BPMM) (paper
2)
3. A generic data model of a common format of process
description (paper 3)
10. The Requirements for the UPR
Elicited preliminary requirements (defined as
propositions) -- an exploratory study
Then validated the propositions -- an empirical study
1. The repository should be able to store process models
in at least one process modeling language
2. The repository should allow storing process models
regardless of their domain
3. Process models in the repository should be
represented in both graphical and textual form
5. Business process should be represented by several
process models having different levels of detail
11. The Requirements for the UPR (2)
5. The repository should store both business and process
models.
6. The repository should allow maintaining multiple
variants of a process model.
7. Process model should be annotated with information
that can facilitate searching, navigating and
interpreting process models
8. Process models in the repository should be
categorized based on different classification schemes
to facilitate navigation
12. A Business Process Metadata Model (BPMM)
The BPMM has been developed based on a systematic
approach, which consists of three phases,
Phase 1: Identification of process related concepts – from
business frameworks, existing process classification
schemes, organizations theory, business process
perspectives
Phase 2: Validation of the concepts – Empirical Study
Phase 3: The model construction – defining metadata
element and their relationship
13. A Business Process Metadata Model (BPMM)
Exchange Conversion
SupportiveCore
Procurement Tech. Development HRM
Firm Infrastructure
Inbound Log.
Operation
Outbound Log.
Marketing&Sales
Service
Strategic
Tactical
Infomation
Financial
Right
Service
Good
Operational
Planning
Identification Negotiation Actualization
Post-Actual ization
PartOf/Include Managed Gen-Spec
has relationship
Hard Goal
Soft Goal
applies To
Industry
Channel
Geopoli ti cal
Constraint
Customer Supplier Employee Investor/CreditorOrg. Unit
involved
is classified By Process Type
Process Area
Resource
Process Rel ationship
Goal
Process Phase
applies To
Process Level
Business Context
Business Process
0..n1..n 0..n1..n
is Of Type
1..n
1..n
1..n
1..n
1..n
1
1..n
1
is consumed/produced By
0..n
1..n
0..n
1..n
1..n1..n 1..n1..n
has Goal
0..n
0..n
0..n
0..n is classified By
1..n
1..n
1..n
1..n
is performed At
Actor
1..n
1..n
1..n
1..n
14. BPMM Evaluation: Results and Discussion
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
R
esou
rce
A
cto
r
Process
Level
Process
R
elatio
nsh
ipProcess
A
rea
Process
Ph
aseProcess
Typ
e
Consistsency
Correctness
15. BPMM Evaluation: Results and Discussion
Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU).
PEOU1: The annotation definitions are clear and helpful for
annotation (>52%).
PEOU2: It was easy to annotate the business processes (>
58%)
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
PEOU1
PEOU2
Strongly Disagree
Disagree
Not Sure
Agree
Strongly Agree
16. A Common Format of a Process Description
Consists - partial data model & mapping specification
Step 1: Defined “process description” - based on the
definition of process model and a business process
Step 2: Generated a generic metamodel - to provide
concrete elements of a business processes
Step 3: Matched the generic metamodel to the process
description (in Step 1) to form a generic process
description that is further used to develop the
partial data model
Step 4: Defined a mapping specification -- the elements
of generic metamodel are matched to the elements
of modeling languages
18. Conclusion
In this research we propose a UPR
The research objectives were to:
elicit requirements for UPR
Develop a model of business process metadata
A common format of process description
The URP is an important step towards reuse of process
models in order to reduce the cost of modeling
business processes from scratch.
This entails challenges, but is relevant for practice,
and serves as an exciting area for research.
19. Future Research Directions
1. Defining a pattern-based method for goal annotation
of business process models in a repository
2. Development of a Business Process Metadata
Annotation Tool for a Process Model Repository
3. Empirical evaluation of the Business Process
Metadata Model