Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures

by Mathias Weske

Overview

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect for experts to handle, by contrast computer scientists often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction. Mathias Weske argues that the communities involved need to share a common understanding of the principles underlying business process management. To this end, he develops an overall picture that describes core BPM concepts and technologies and explains their relationships. This picture covers high-level business aspects like business goals, strategies, and value chains, but it concentrates on process modeling techniques and process enactment platforms, taking into account the different stakeholders involved.

After starting with a presentation of general foundations, process orchestrations and process choreographies are covered. Based on control flow patterns, concrete process languages are introduced in a concise manner, including Workflow nets, Event-driven Process Chains, Yet Another Workflow Language, and the Business Process Modeling Notation. The various stages during the design and implementation of process choreographies are discussed. Different soundness properties are investigated in a chapter on formal aspects of business processes. Finally, he investigates concrete architectures to enact business processes, including workflow management architectures, case handling architectures and service-oriented architectures. He also shows howstandards like SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture. This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. It is also valuable for project managers and IT professionals working in business process management, since it provides a vendor-independent view on the topic. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information, such as links to references that are available online, exercises that offer the reader a deeper involvement with the topics addressed, and additional teaching material.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783642286162
Publisher:	Springer-Verlag New York, LLC
Publication date:	05/03/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Mathias Weske is Professor of Software Systems Technology at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam, Germany, where he leads the business process technology research group. His current research interests include various topics in workflow management, web services technology, and enterprise application integration. He is a member of the GI, vice chair of the executive committee of GI SIG EMISA, and a member of IEEE and ACM.

Table of Contents

Foundation
Introduction     3
Motivation and Definitions     4
Business Process Lifecycle     11
Classification of Business Processes     17
Goals, Structure, and Organization     21
Evolution of Enterprise Systems Architectures     25
Traditional Application Development     26
Enterprise Applications and their Integration     28
Enterprise Modelling and Process Orientation     39
Workflow Management     49
Enterprise Services Computing     57
Summary     65
Bibliographical Notes     67
Business Process Modelling
Business Process Modelling Foundation     73
Conceptual Model and Terminology     73
Abstraction Concepts     75
From Business Functions to Business Processes     78
Activity Models and Activity Instances     82
Process Models and Process Instances     88
Process Interactions     96
Modelling Process Data     98
Modelling Organization     102
Modelling Operation     107
Business Process Flexibility     111
Architecture of Process Execution Environments     120
Bibliographical Notes     124
Process Orchestrations     125
Control Flow Patterns     126
Petri Nets     149
Event-driven Process Chains     158
Workflow Nets     169
Yet Another Workflow Language     182
Graph-Based Workflow Language     200
Business Process Modeling Notation     205
Bibliographical Notes     225
Process Choreographies     227
Motivation and Terminology     228
Development Phases     231
Process Choreography Design     233
Process Choreography Implementation     245
Service Interaction Patterns     248
Let's Dance     258
Bibliographical Notes     266
Properties of Business Processes     267
Data Dependencies     268
Structural Soundness     270
Soundness     271
Relaxed Soundness     279
Weak Soundness     285
Lazy Soundness     290
Soundness Criteria Overview     299
Bibliographical Notes     301
Architectures and Methodologies
Business Process Management Architectures     305
Workflow Management Architectures      305
Flexible Workflow Management     310
Web Services and their Composition     315
Advanced Service Composition     324
Data-Driven Processes: Case Handling     333
Bibliographical Notes     342
Business Process Methodology     345
Methodology Overview     345
Strategy and Organization     345
Survey     350
Design Phase     351
Platform Selection     352
Implementation and Testing     354
Operation and Controlling Phase     355
Bibliographical Notes     355
References     357
Index     365

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book presents comprehensive and updated material for anyone interested in getting to know the vast field of BPM. With its excellent organization and use of many figures, it can also be an excellent choice as a text book on BPM.” (Amit Sheth, LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA)

“An extremely well rounded and comprehensive discussion of the subject of business process management.” (Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, San Jose, CA, USA)

“A superb textbook for students in both computer science and business administration. Moreover, it is also very useful for practitioners since it provides a comprehensive coverage of BPM independently of industry hypes around workflow management, business process management, and service-oriented architectures.” (from the Foreword by Wil van der Aalst, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)

“Business process management (BPM) is a topic more pressing than ever even 15 years after its inception. Mathias Weske takes an up-to-date, fresh, and comprehensive look at the subject and connects a number of areas to which BPM applies, from a conceptual as well as a technical and an application-oriented point of view. A definitive must-read for anybody studying or working in this area.” (Gottfried Vossen, European Research Center for Information Systems, University of Muenster)

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews of the second edition:

“The subject Business process management is of interest to professional in business administration and computer science. … The author opines that both the communities need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. In this context, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. … This is an ideal text book for the students for CSE & business administration.” (CSI eNewsletter, Vol. 3 (10), November, 2012)

From the Publisher