iGoogle duly delivered a reference (but not the referencing blog post) to an interesting IBM Research paper on “providing a new foundation for the Management of Business Operations and Processes”. To summarise (or at least, my interpretion was) :
- activity diagrams (and by extension, process diagrams) are problematic due to the effect of silo-based viewing and cross-process communications
- the key business-level model is the business artifact state model
- state models should be supported by forward chaining business rules to match events to business goals and strategies.
The good news: state models supported by production rules is available today to TIBCO BusinessEvents customers.
The bad news: it seems we have a new IT acronym for such systems: Business Operations Management or BOM. All abbreviations have to be overloaded it seems, so this time it is the turn of Business Object Models to be re-used. In some ways I like the BOM term in the context of operations as (a) it differentiates event-driven tools like BusinessEvents from the more traditional BPEL-focused BPM engines, and (b) supports the idea of Operational Intelligence that CEP tools provide.
Not surprisingly the paper omits to mention TIBCO in the “related work” slides, but it does cover healthcare case management – which hopefully explains our interest in the current discussions on an OMG Case Management standard… (case management being a special case itself of “artifact centric BPM”, a conference on which was the source for the research slides referenced earlier…).
Paul:
I think it the publication of this link on my feed that triggered iGoogle (http://www.ebpml.org/feed.xml)
Glad to see Tibco is aligned with these ideas !!
Cheers,
JJ-
Jean-Jacques – for sure I think we are reasonably aligned! For some reason your blog entries don’t match the feed.xml, but anyways thanks for solving the mystery!
Cheers
Hi Sandy – indeed, and some of the other papers are interesting too.
What I couldn’t find was the blog that commented on this URL even though it was a post in a blog I’m following on iGoogle – bizarre but true. I’m guessing the RSS feed must be pointing to an aggregator or something. Indeed iGoogle displays some text from a real blog – so it exists! – but then Google search couldn’t find it!!! Or find it yet, anyways… or maybe its been deleted.
PS: RSS feed claims the blog post is http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/CarnetsDeBord/%7E3/IH7XmG_7s5w/hull.pdf – ie the conference PDF.
Another reference to this is http://www.allbusiness.com/professional-services/architectural-design-engineering/11583765-1.html
Cheers
The referencing website can be found by traversing up the URL that you link to: go to http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lenzerin/INFINT2009/, and you’ll see it’s for a workshop on data and service integration. Click on the “Program” link in the menu on the left and there are links to all of the papers, including this one.