Presentation of the Usi4Biz framework at Tamodia’09, focusing on the production rules used to perform model transformations and impact analyses. Rules for model transformations are useful to save time when creating models and links between them. Rules for impact analysis are very important to verify what is going to happen if a specific change is made in any node of the model network.

1. A Rule-Based Approach for Model Management in a
User Interface - Business Alignment Framework
Kênia Sousa, Hildeberto Mendonça, Jean Vanderdonckt
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Louvain School of Management (LSM)
Belgian Laboratory of Computer-Human Interaction (BCHI)

2. Motivations
• In the competitive market, organizations are now, more
than ever, managing changes to improve BPs.
• The industry has realized that it is no longer only IT infra-
structure that is pivotal to improve services for customers.
• A study has shown that alignment with UI contributed to
100 to 200% user productivity gains (Henry, 2007).
• Changes on business processes that directly impact UIs are
rarely considered in the literature.
• Widen viewpoint beyond IT-Business perspective.

3. IT-Business Alignment
• The CEO Framework
represents an enterprise
architecture that aligns
the organization’s strategy
with its business
processes, IT software
and hardware and people.
• No vision for UIs
• Changes impacting on UIs
are not carefully handled
• How to address large
systems with hundreds of
UIs?
(Vasconcelos, 2001)

4. Model-Driven UID
• Vision for user interfaces, but not for user interaction: Alignment of BP
with UIs with direct links between activities in processes to elements
on the UIs.
• Absence of generic structure: Decomposition of a business process in
layers done for specific scenarios.
• Scarcity in tool support for traceability: Frameworks with principles, but
not tools to support decision making.
• Not enough concern with people: Focus on how the artifacts are linked,
handled and maintained, rather than on the people who use the
enterprise systems.

5. Goals
• Enable fast adaptation to new business challenges
considering business context and user perspective
• Stronger relationship between business processes and
UIs
• Predict impact analysis when changes are made on
business processes or on UIs
• Support decision makers with analytical information
(impacted end-users, units, etc.)

6. Contribution
• The need to focus on user interaction has led us to
innovate on aligning IT with BPs through UIs by originally
calling the term UI -Business Alignm ent.
• UI-Business Alignment is a framework that brings forward
the user perspective in the business context with a
methodology and tool.
• Mapping UI models is supported by UsiXML, a UI definition
language that represents models in a structured form.
• Appropriate for large organizations with hundreds of users,
thousands UIs and heterogeneous systems.

7. Methodology

8. Why Task Models?
• Recognized by its precision when representing user
interaction with systems;
• It has a hierarchical structure that provides an overview of
the user interaction;
• Its hierarchical structure has the same purpose of the
business process structure: from high level to detailed
description of the work to be done;
• The symmetry of both structures represents a clear bridge
between business processes and UIs.

9. Impact Analysis
• Rules support impact analysis to verify when a node is
changed, what can be done in the other models to
maintain alignment.
• Transformation rules: perform transformations between
the models considered in the methodology;
• Change management rules: make an impact analysis of
changes made on any of the models;
• Verification rules: check the coherence of the association
of task models with UI components.
• Defined 53 transformation and change management rules;
explored for different operations, totalizing in 212 rules for
the forward approach.

10. Transformation Rules
Business Model Task Model
Sequence Flow (no condition, default) Enabling
Sequence Flow (conditional)/ with Data Object Enabling + info. passing
Rule Intermediate Event + Link Interm. Event Suspend/resume
Data-Based Exclusive gateway Deterministic choice
Inclusive decision + Exclusive merge Non-Deterministic choice
Cancel Intermediate Event Disabling
Ad-Hoc marker in sub-process Independence
Parallel gateway Concurrency
Parallel gateway + Data Object Concurrency + info passing
Sub – Process Task
Task Task

11. Transformation Rules
rule “AddBPMNSequenceFlow”
when
s: SequenceFlow(id == “sF-LogIn-ViewRequest”)
then
insert(new Enabling(s.getId(),s.getSourceRef(),s.getTargetRef()));
end

12. Change Management Rules
rule “ModifyTMAtomicUITaskIntoSubTasks”
when
an atomic task (‘Change of applicant data’) is modified into a task composed of sub-tasks
then
add SE for sub-tasks (‘Change product’, ‘Change tax’) in the SF of the task (‘Financial data’)
end

13. Change Management Rules
• Backward Tracking
rule “AddUIScreen”
when
a new screen (‘Request Second Opinion’) is created with SE(‘Send-Work-Contract’, ‘Send-
Bank-Statement’, ‘Send-Salary-Statement’)
then
create a task for the new screen and sub-tasks for each SE within this screen
end

14. Verification Rules
Task Model User Interface
• After associating tasks
with screen components,
check if the association
is coherent.
• « If the node is a screen
group, then the node
below it is screen group
or screen »;
• « If the node is a screen
and is the second to last
level, then the node
below it is screen
element ».

15. Tool Support

16. Advantages
• User-Centered: stakeholders visualize how the process is
performed through UIs.
• Traceable: chain of links assist in identifying the impact of
changes to maintain the alignment between BP and UIs.
• Human-Centered: cross-organizational engagement
(making business analysts and users aware of changes).
• Optimization: users, a source of process optimization:
the way they do activities impacts process performance.
• Adaptation:
• Mapping elements at different levels of granularity
influences the result of impact analysis.
• Changes in the structure of the models, rules can be
updated, without maintenance of the tool.

17. Thank you!
http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi
BCHI Lab
http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi/members/kso/
http://www.usixml.org
UI extensible Markup Language
http://www.programalban.org
Program Alban

18. Publications
• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J. A Model-Driven Approach to
Align Business Processes with User Interfaces. International Journal of
Universal Computer Science, Special issue on Human-Computer
Interaction, Nov. 2008.
• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J. User Interface Development
Lifecycle for Business-Driven Enterprise Applications. 7th International
Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces CADUI’08,
2008.
• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J. Addressing the Impact of
Business Process Changes on Software User Interfaces. Proc. of 3rd
IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on Business-Driven IT Management
(BDIM 2008), 2008, pp. 11-20.
• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J., Rogier, E., Vandermeulen,
J. User Interface Derivation from Business Processes: A Model-Driven
Approach for Organizational Engineering. Proc. of SAC’2008, ACM
Press, NY, 2008, pp. 553-560.