Domain-specific studios to create, deploy and manage Business Processes

by Dr. Adrian Mos, Senior Research de Xerox Research Center Europe.

Business process design and monitoring are essential elements of Business Process Management (BPM), often relying on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, the current BPM approaches and standards have not sufficiently reduced the Business-IT gap. Today’s solutions are mostly domain-independent and platform-dependent, which limits the ability of business matter experts to express business intent and enact process change. In contrast, I will be talking about an approach that focuses on BPM and SOA environments in a domain-dependent and platform-independent way. By adding a domain specific layer on top of current solutions, business stakeholders can design and understand their processes in a more intuitive way. Several technical solutions are integrated in an end-to-end methodology (from design to monitoring and back). They include a mechanism for generating intuitive yet feature-rich graphical process studios for various business domains that are fully integrated with standard business process management solutions and enterprise services. Such a mechanism reduces the need for costly development and maintenance of process studios while ensuring that business users have consistent access to the ever-evolving enterprise body of knowledge. These domain-specific studios are used to create, deploy and manage processes, providing platform independence through model-to-model transformations. Besides process design and evolution, the talk will also highlight elements related to data management, form definition, change-management and reporting.