IS IS 788 [Process] Change Management  Lecture: BPMN, UML and business process modeling tools  Discussion: ethnographic and analytic field work for your project processes  Discussion: exam format

IS BPMN – in depth  Harmon uses ‘mostly’ standard BPMN so we’ve had exposure to most elements  The notation was designed by an industry consortium (a subgroup of OMG) to be intuitive to most business persons Constructs relate directly to the business environment (not necessarily the IT environment) Similarity to flowchart notation is deliberate Small number of constructs; thus, useful and practical

IS Criteria for conceptual modeling grammars  Modeling elements close to the modeled domain  Relationships closely related to those in the modeled domain  SIMPLICITY while – Representing ALL elements of the domain (model) i.e. ontological completeness Naturally representing all relationships and operations (discuss hierarchical vs. relational databases wrt bill of materials)

IS Criteria for conceptual modeling grammars (2)  Must balance a concern for Model generation (writing) Model interpretation (reading) This balance must frequently bridge audiences of different temperament and training  This is a design problem. I cannot recommend too strongly Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”

IS The eternal dream redoux  Another BPMN design criteria was to be easily translatable to BPEL4WS (business process execution language for web services)  The dream is to have working software generated directly from process models – software from specifications has been a dream for 50 years; forgive me if I’m skeptical  More about this when we discuss BPR and software development

IS The four basic categories of elements are:  Flow Objects  Connecting Objects  Swimlanes  Artifacts

IS Flow Objects - not well named IMHO  Basic process concepts: Events: something that happens  Activity: task and sub-process – same symbol:  Gateway: control and sequencing start intermediateend

IS Connecting Objects  Sequence flow – the order of events/activities  Message flow – messages or information between participants  Association: link text, data to constructs

IS Swimlanes  Pool – a participant or functional group  Lane – subdivision of a pool

IS Artifacts  Data object: data produced by activities  Group: lasso two or more entities to group them  Annotation Some text linked to something else

IS Inter-organizational (B2B) processes

IS Multiple levels of detail  roduction%20to%20BPMN.pdf roduction%20to%20BPMN.pdf  Page 9, Figures 7, 8  Note high (customer level) and detail – internal to the organization - beneath

IS Standards coming real soon  BPMN is not a standard (i.e. has not been submitted to and approved by an international standards organization) but probably will become one replacing – for process modeling: UML (subsets and dialects) IDEF ebXML ADF (activity/decision flow diagrams) Etc., etc., etc.

IS UML- “But wait – there’s more!”  Camel: a horse designed by committee  IMHO UML has grown from a complex modeling language to an impossibly complex modeling language (discuss origins)  I assume all IT folk have had some exposure. For this class we’ll concentrate on some of the best features of the monster

IS UML and process modeling  There are a number of groups who still strongly support the use of UML for modeling processes.  It was tried extensively starting in the late ’90’s and found wanting.  A business process model, more than any other, should foster communication between domain experts and implementers  Turn to the handouts of the UML simple system model and imagine explaining this to the university President and Provost.

IS The best of UML (mostly Jacobsen)  Use Cases – see handouts from 750  Activity Diagrams  Actor-Interaction Diagrams  s/umlDiagrams.htm s/umlDiagrams.htm

IS A simple business process modeling methodology On-site analysis ethnography Observations, field notes Think: add structure Activity diagrams; use-case diagrams; rich pictures Think: add structure Formal use-cases Actor-interaction diagrams Detailed BPMN process model Think: add structure

IS Communications tools  In my experience use-case diagrams and high-level actor interaction diagrams can be useful in communicating with a business audience  Formal (text) use cases are great documentation and can be used to communicate detailed system interaction to domain experts assigned to the project. (Others will likely not make the effort to read and understand the text.)