1 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 How to Describe Workflow Information Systems to Support Business Process Josefina Guerrero García, Jean Vanderdonckt, Christophe Lemaige, Juan M. González Calleros Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) Louvain School of Management (LSM) Information Systems Unit (ISYS) Place des Doyens, 1 – B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

2 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Outline Introduction State of the art Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information Systems How to Generate the User Interfaces Case study and tool support Conclusion

3 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Introduction Business processes are performed to ensure that work progress towards accomplishment of goals. Information systems have been developed to support the management of processes and their coordination. The term Workflow is referring to the handling of businesses processes using information systems, and denominates the automation of a business process, in whole or part.

4 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Introduction Workflow Information Systems (WIS) cover the application of information technology to business problems. Its primary characteristic is the automation of processes involving combinations of human activities with information technology applications. Owing to the fact that the users of a IS interact with it through its user interfaces (UIs) in the pursuit of organizational goals, flexibility in creating them is therefore important. We will explore a systematic way to define UIs for a WIS.

5 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 State of the art A number of approaches have been used to model business processes and workflows; those include: –notations: Petri Nets, Statecharts Diagrams, BPMN, UML Activity Diagrams –software tools: Progression Model, YAWL, Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, WebSphere® MQ Workflow, WIDE, ARIS, among others –workflow patterns: Control flow patterns, workflow data patterns, workflow resource patterns

6 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 State of the art Model-based user interface design is intended to assist in designing user interfaces (UIs) with a more formal computer supported methodology. There are solutions to developing UIs that are based in eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). UsiXML is a XML compliant markup language capturing the essence of what a UI is or should be independently of physical characteristics.

7 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information Systems We propose a framework that considers the principal components to model workflow. The intention is to use this model as a base to develop UIs. The underlying conceptual model is composed of: process, task, and organization models.

8 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information Systems A process model indicates the ordering of processes in time, space, and resources. A task model represents a decomposition of tasks into sub- tasks linked with task relationships. An organizational model contains the elements involved in an organization

9 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 How to Generate the User Interfaces the Cameleon Reference Framework for developing multi-target UIs, which is decomposed in four steps

10 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 How to Generate the User Interfaces UsiXML has been selected as the UIDL. It describes at a high level of abstraction the constituting elements of the UI of an application: widgets, controls, containers, modalities, interaction techniques, etc.

11 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 How to Generate the User Interfaces the stylistics in a graphical representation relies on icons.

12 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support The case study analyzes how people organize the program of small conferences by using a review tool. IDTASKJOB OrganizerReviewerAuthor 1Find the program committee X 7Submit paperX 12Review paperX 19Edit proceedings X Tasks and jobs identificatio n

13 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support

14 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support ResourceJobOrganizational unit Chloé Lambin OrganizerUL Rachel WalshReviewerReviewer’s university A-1AuthorAuthor’s university Resource and organizational unit identification

15 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support

16 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support

17 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 TaskJobResourcePattern Find the program committee OrganizerChloé LambinDirect allocation Install conference tool OrganizerEllen MartinCapability based Submit paperAuthorA-1Deferred Review paperReviewerSteve GellerDirect allocation Assigning tasks to resources

18 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support

19 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support

20 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support

21 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support User interface

22 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support Agenda

23 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Case study and tool support Work list

24 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Conclusion We have introduced a methodology for developing the various user interfaces of a workflow information system, which are advocated to automate business processes, following a model-centric approach based on the requirements and processes of the organization. A conceptual modeling approach integrates the following concept defined through a meta-model: workflow, process, task, domain, job definition, organizational structure, and resources. These concepts along with their attributes have been integrated in UsiXML

25 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Conclusion From each task model, transformational rules were applied in order to generate the different UIs involved in the workflow. A workflow editor-manager tool has been developed to support the method enactment. A case study has been reported and summarized to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. This method has been validated on several real-world case studies. As future work, usability guidelines will be applied in the generation of UIs, workflow analysis methods will be taken into account.

26 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation Cristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008 Thank you very much for your attention For more information and downloading, User Interface eXtensible Markup Language European network on Multimodal UIs Special thanks to all members of the team!