1 workshop on business-driven enterprise application design & implementation cristal city,...

1 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal 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)

http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/

2 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal 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 & ImplementationCristal 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.

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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.

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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 & ImplementationCristal 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.

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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 & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information Systems

decomposition temporal

unaryRelationshipbinaryRelationship

sequential

synchronization

parallelSplit

exclusiveChoice

simpleMerge

multiChoice

meansMaterials immaterial

machine hardwareM software services

processOperator

workList

taskRelationship

workflow

processModel

workItem

logEntry taskModel

process

taskResource

agendaItem

task

agenda

job

userStereotype

organizationalUnit

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1

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A processmodel indicates the ordering of processes in time, space, and resources.

A task modelrepresents a decomposition of tasks into sub-tasks linked with task relationships.

An organizationalmodel contains the elements involved inan organization

9 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

How to Generate the User Interfaces

Task & domain

AUI level

CUI level

FUI level

Task & domain

AUI level

CUI level

FUI level

the Cameleon Reference Framework for developingmulti-target UIs, which is decomposed infour steps

10 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

How to Generate the User Interfaces

taskModelProcessWorkflow

Task & domain

AUI level

CUI level

FUI level

uiModel

transformationModel

domainModel

auiModel

mappingModel

contextModel

cuiModel

Context of use

taskModelProcessWorkflow

Task & domain

AUI level

CUI level

FUI level

uiModel

transformationModel

domainModel

auiModel

mappingModel

contextModel

cuiModel

Context of use

UsiXML has been selected as the UIDL.

It describes at a high level of abstractionthe constituting elements of the UI of an application:widgets, controls, containers, modalities, interactiontechniques, etc.

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How to Generate the User Interfaces

the stylistics in a graphical representation relies on icons.

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Case study and tool support

The case study analyzes how people organize the program of small conferences by using a review tool.

ID TASK JOB

Organizer

Reviewer

Author

1 Find the program

committee

X

7 Submit paper X

12 Review paper X

19 Edit proceedings

X

Tasks and jobs

identification

13 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Case study and tool support

14 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Case study and tool support

Resource Job Organizational unit

Chloé Lambin

Organizer UL

Rachel Walsh

Reviewer Reviewer’s university

A-1 Author Author’s university

Resource and organizational

unit identification

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Case study and tool support

16 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Case study and tool support

17 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Task Job Resource Pattern

Find the program committee

Organizer Chloé Lambin

Direct allocation

Install conference tool

Organizer Ellen Martin Capability based

Submit paper

Author A-1 Deferred

Review paper

Reviewer Steve Geller Direct allocation

Assigning tasks to resources

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Case study and tool support

19 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Case study and tool support

20 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Case study and tool support

21 Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Case study and tool supportUser interface

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Case study and tool support

Agenda

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Case study and tool support

Work list

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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 & ImplementationCristal 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 & ImplementationCristal City, Washington D.C., USA, July 21, 2008

Thank you very much for your attention

For more information and downloading,http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi

http://www.usixml.orgUser Interface eXtensible Markup Language

http://www.similar.ccEuropean network on Multimodal UIs

Special thanks to all members of the team!