The Need for Second Order Interoperation

Heterogeneity and Interoperability in Local Public Health Information Systems.

The problem which companies want to face is the integration of the applications in an information system (IS) and the interconnection of the system itself with other information systems. The interoperability of IS constitutes, their ability to communicate and to inter-operate following a given model using a common language favoring the sharing of information for better performance and profitability. [1] In this article we reminder of the model that we have proposed for the interoperability of IS, it is a model of interconnection having for objective the synchronization of the business process of IS interconnected. This synchronization is based mainly on the transformation of business processes BPMN (Business Process Model Notation) of the different IS in Executable Languages Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) thanks to a language ATL (ATLAS Transformation Language) then bring together all the BPEL in a single global BPEL to basis of the rules of adaptation and an ontological database. Then and using the reverse engineering, to make an update, well adapted, Process BPMN trades of different IS. The key point of this architecture is the use of the ontological database. We present in this article a new hybrid model of ontological database based on two approaches of schema of ontological storage different that we were able to create from the result of analysis of a comparative study of database systems to ontological basis (BDBO). This analysis has helped us to adopt a hybrid model of BDBO who owns his own architecture and its storage model. This hybrid model that we are going to adopt for the implementation of the interoperability model of several information systems.

Business process (BP) designs and enterprise information system (IS) designs are often not well aligned. Missing alignment may result in performance problems at run-time, such as large process execution time or overloaded IS resources. The complex interrelations between BPs and ISs are not adequately understood and considered in development so far. Simulation is a promising approach to predict performance of both BP and IS designs. Based on prediction results, design alternatives can be compared and verified against requirements. Thus, BP and IS designs can be aligned to improve performance. In current simulation approaches, BP simulation and IS simulation are not adequately integrated. This results in limited prediction accuracy due to neglected interrelations between the BP and the IS in simulation. In this paper, we present the novel approach Integrated Business IT Impact Simulation (IntBIIS) to adequately reflect the mutual impact between BPs and ISs in simulation. Three types of mutual impact between BPs and ISs in terms of performance are specified. We discuss several solution alternatives to predict the impact of a BP on the performance of ISs and vice versa. It is argued that an integrated simulation of BPs and ISs is best suited to reflect their interrelations. We propose novel concepts for continuous modeling and integrated simulation. IntBIIS is implemented by extending the Palladio tool chain with BP simulation concepts. In a real-life case study with a BP and IS from practice, we validate the feasibility of IntBIIS and discuss the practicability of the corresponding tool support.

Business processes and information systems mutually affect each other in non-trivial ways. Frequently, the business process design and the information system design are not well aligned. This means that business processes are designed without taking the information system impact into account, and vice versa. Missing alignment at design time often results in quality problems at runtime, such as large response times of information systems, large process execution times, overloaded information systems or interrupted processes. Aligning business process quality and information system quality at design time requires to
\nsolve the following problems (P). Business process quality and information system quality have to be characterized. P1: In contrast to information system quality, which is specified in the ISO/IEC 9126 standard, for example, there is no common and comprehensive understanding of business process quality. P2: Beyond that, current business process
\nmodeling notations do not aim to represent quality aspects. The impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, is unknown at design
\ntime. P3: The mutual impact between business processes and information systems must be predicted at design time.
\nIn this thesis, the Business Process Quality Reference-Model (BPQRM), a quality model for business processes, is introduced. The model allows for a comprehensive characterization of business process quality (P1). The BPQRM is applied successfully in a case study to
\nidentify potential for process quality improvement in practice. Based on the BPQRM an existing process modeling notation is extended by model elements to represent quality
\naspects (P2). Simulation is a powerful means to predict the impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, at design time. This thesis proposes two simulation approaches to predict the mutual impact between business processes and information systems, in terms of performance (P3). The approach Business
\nIT Impact Simulation (BIIS) defines interfaces between the business process simulation and the information system simulation. Performance-relevant information is exchanged
\nvia the interfaces between both simulations. Using business process simulation and information system simulation in isolation, workload burstiness is not adequately reflected.
\nThis is especially true for occasional, volatile peak loads. Workload burstiness can significantly affect the performance of business processes and information systems. The approach Integrated Business IT Impact Simulation (IntBIIS) for the integration of business processes and information systems in a single simulation allows for reflecting workload burstiness correctly. The simulation approaches support the comparison of design alternatives and the verification of a certain design against requirements. A case study confirms the feasibility in practice and the acceptance from practitioners’ point of
\nview.

The CHEMS (Chemical Health and Safety Environmental Management System) project is described. The project involved the development and validation of an integrated process and logical data model that describes the functions and information needs for managing the chemical, environmental, health, and safety areas of the business. The CHEMS modeling effort was started in January 1992. The teams consisted of expert users in their respective fields. The model was completed in May 1992 and includes the impact and integration of CHEMS processes with other key business processes such as production, plant operations, purchasing, and personnel. The business process was defined and included the creation of entity relationships and data flow diagrams. The modeling scope covered the life cycle management of a material from initial request for use to final disposition. The result of this activity was the defining of the following seven key CHEMS business processes and modules: perform chemical information management, perform chemical administration, perform environmental impact assessment, manage environmental data, manage health and safety, manage compliance, and manage CHEMS effectiveness. >

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

Organizations that manage their Business Processes (BPs) poorly -or that not manage them at all- have well-known problems regarding their operation, both at the BPs and the Information Systems (IS) levels. Some of these problems are due to a vertical and functional vision of the organization, without any global BP vision. In this context, similar decentralized organizational units very often perform the same BPs sometimes in different ways. Moreover, some BPs are implicit in the IS supporting them. In this article we present an experience report of a BPM pilot project we have carried out within our university, as an initiative to improve BPs management and corresponding IS support. We started specifying a process map for management support BPs, and then we selected key BPs which where specified, modeled and implemented using BPMN 2.0 and Bonita BPMS, to shift the organization focus from traditional IS to Process Aware IS (PAIS).

An empirical investigation of information systems interoperability business value in European firms

In recent years, firms in almost all industries have conducted a number of initiatives to explore new digital technologies and to exploit their benefits. This frequently involves transformations of key business operations and affects products and processes, as well as organizational structures and management concepts. Companies need to establish management practices to govern these complex transformations. An important approach is to formulate a digital transformation strategy that serves as a central concept to integrate the entire coordination, prioritization, and implementation of digital transformations within a firm. The exploitation and integration of digital technologies often affect large parts of companies and even go beyond their borders, by impacting products, business processes, sales channels, and supply chains. Potential benefits of digitization are manifold and include increases in sales or productivity, innovations in value creation, as well as novel forms of interaction with customers, among others. As a result, entire business models can be reshaped or replaced (Downes and Nunes 2013). Owing to this wide scope and the far-reaching consequences, digital transformation strategies seek to coordinate and prioritize the many independent threads of digital transformation. To account for their company-spanning characteristics, digital transformation strategies cut across other business strategies and should be aligned with them (Fig. 1). While there are various concepts of IT strategies (Teubner 2013), these mostly define the current and the future operational activities, the necessary application systems and infrastructures, and the adequate organizational and financial framework for providing IT to carry out business operations within a company. Hence, IT strategies usually focus on the management of the IT infrastructure within a firm, with rather limited impact on driving innovations in business development. To some degree, this restricts the product-centric and customer-centric opportunities that arise from new digital technologies, which often cross firms’ borders. Further, IT strategies present systemcentric road maps to the future uses of technologies in a firm, but they do not necessarily account for the transformation of products, processes, and structural aspects that go along with the integration of technologies. Digital transformation strategies take on a different perspective and pursue different goals. Coming from a business-centric perspective, these strategies focus on the transformation of products, processes, and organizational aspects owing to new technologies. Their scope is more broadly designed and explicitly includes digital activities at the interface with or fully on the side of customers, such as Accepted after one revision by Prof. Dr. Sinz.

Poor data quality may be a cause for problems in organizational processes. There are numerous methods to assess and improve quality of data within information systems, however they often do not address the original source of these problems. This paper presents a conceptual solution for dealing with the data quality issue within information systems. It focuses on analysis of business processes being a source of requirements for information systems design and development. This analysis benefits information quality requirements, in order to improve data quality within systems emerging from these requirements.

This chapter reviews efforts of selected standards consortia to develop Internet-based approaches for interoperable manufacturing enterprise information systems. The focus of the chapter is on the efforts to capture common meaning of data exchanged among interoperable information systems inside and outside a manufacturing enterprise. We start this chapter by giving a general overview of the key concepts in standards approaches to enable interoperable manufacturing enterprise systems. These approaches are compared on the basis of several characteristics found in standards frameworks such as horizontal or vertical focus of the standard, the standard message content definitions, the standard process definitions, and dependence on specific standard messaging solutions. After this initial overview, we establish one basis for reasoning about interoperable information systems by recognizing key manufacturing enterprise objects managed and exchanged both inside and outside the enterprise. Such conceptual objects are coarse in granularity and are meant to drive semantic definitions of data interchanges by providing a shared context for data dictionaries detailing the semantics of these objects and interactions or processes involved in data exchange. In the case of intra-enterprise interoperability, we recognize enterprise information processing activities, responsibilities, and those high-level conceptual objects exchanged in interactions among systems to fulfill the assignedmore » responsibilities. Here, we show a mapping of one content standard onto the identified conceptual objects. In the case of inter-enterprise interoperability, we recognize key business processes areas and enumerate high-level conceptual objects that need to be exchanged among supply chain or trading partners. Here, we also show example mappings of representative content standards onto the identified conceptual objects. We complete this chapter by providing an account of some advanced work to enhance interoperability of manufacturing enterprise information systems in the context of the enterprise standards development.« less

Enterprises in today’s networked economy face numerous information management challenges, both from a process management perspective as well as a decision support perspective. While there have been significant relevant advances in the areas of business process management as well as decision sciences, several open research issues exist. In this paper, we highlight the following key challenges. First, current process modeling and management techniques lack in providing a seamless integration of decision models and tools in existing business processes, which is critical to achieve organizational objectives. Second, given the dynamic nature of business processes in networked enterprises, process management approaches that enable organizations to react to business process changes in an agile manner are required. Third, current state-of-the-art decision model management techniques are not particularly amenable to distributed settings in networked enterprises, which limits the sharing and reuse of models in different contexts, including their utility within managing business processes. In this paper, we present a framework for decision-enabled dynamic process management that addresses these challenges. The framework builds on computational formalisms, including the structured modeling paradigm for representing decision models, and hierarchical task networks from the artificial intelligence (AI) planning area for process modeling. Within the framework, interleaved process planning (modeling), execution and monitoring for dynamic process management throughout the process lifecycle is proposed. A service-oriented architecture combined with advances from the semantic Web field for model management support within business processes is proposed.

Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.

Taking into account the key factors of the development of society, the expediency of using certain information technologies for the effective competitive development of enterprises is emphasized. The need for the use of appropriate information technologies is confirmed by the advantages of their implementation. In the course of the study, it is disclosed that the basis of the modern information society is certain SMART-systems, and the driver of competitive development of enterprise is the re-engineering of its business processes, which determined the purpose of the study. To achieve the goal of defining and clarifying the features of SMART-systems to ensure the effective implementation of business processes of the enterprise, the methods of analysis, synthesis, abstraction, comparison, idealization, analogy, and concretization were used. The content of the concept of «SMART-systems» is characterized, the features of the application are described. The expediency and necessity of dividing SMART-systems into certain types depending on their vector-level application have been determined. The features of SMART-systems of each of the selected groups are outlined. The expediency of dividing SMART-systems into the proposed groups is substantiated by the possibility of their more operative implementation, faster adaptation, wider range of application and the ability to combine them as constituent elements of the hierarchical structure of an integral system. The hierarchical interaction of information systems of different groups will contribute to the formation of a comprehensive SMART-system for ensuring the effective competitive development of an individual enterprise with its component technologies, software products, etc., due to the possibility of combining the advantages of some systems, leveling the difficulties of implementing others. It is substantiated that the integrity of the information and digital support of the enterprise’s activities will contribute to the choice of more effective options for the interaction of individual business processes, their more efficient implementation and more flexible editing depending on changes in the conditions for the functioning of enterprises, as well as focusing more attention on key business processes at a particular point in time.

Living IT infrastructures — An ontology-based approach to aligning IT infrastructure capacity and business needs