The Future of BPM: Flying with the Eagles or Scratching with the Chickens?

Service-oriented architectures, business process management (BPM) systems, and BPM in general receive a lot of attention these days and the number of articles which describe the benefits and great potential of these technologies has signicantly increased. It is something like a second wave after the first (and short) workflow hype in the middle of the 90's. However, the contemporary hype in newspapers and IT magazines does not really reflect reality. In fact, much more companies are still thinking about whether and in which form they shall introduce these technologies rather than concretely performing projects in these fields. And many companies which have started respective projects are still in the phase of designing and implementing (web) services or in evaluating SOA platforms and repositories of different vendors; i.e., they are still not bringing (larger) processes into production. Nevertheless, expectations are very high: Everything will become easier and more flexible, implementation of cross-organizational processes will become business as usual, and process management systems will enable new kinds of process-aware applications which have to be performed manually today. In fact, BPM has a great potential. However, to realize this potential in practice, we have to face much more the challenges of the real world, we have to learn more seriously from how business processes are executed today, and we have to understand how actors deal with exceptional situations. It is not hard to predict what will happen with the current BPM hype if users discover that they cannot do much more with these technologies than with previous ones or, even worse, that they can do less. And no organization will accept to become inflexible. It is partially up to us, whether BPM will become a big and sustainable success or whether it will share the fate of many other hypes (like Computer Integrated Manufacturing at the end of the 80's). This talk will present real-world examples from different domains to illustrate where we jump too short. It will use the ADEPT project to show how stimulating it can be also from a research point of view to face the reality as it is

Efficient Distributed Control of Enterprise-Wide and Cross-EnterpriseWorkflows

In large workflow management systems (WfMS), it is particularly important to control workflows (WF) in an efficient manner. A very critical factor within this context is the resulting communication overhead. For this reason we have developed an approach for distributed WF control, which tries to keep the communication overhead low. In this paper, this approach is described and examined by means of a simulation

Interaction Expressions - A Powerful Formalism for Describing Inter-Workflow Dependencies

Current workflow management technology does not provide adequate means for describing and implementing workflow ensembles, i. e., dynamically evolving collections of more or less independent workflows which have to synchronize only now and then. Interaction expressions are proposed as a simple yet powerful formalism to remedy this shortcoming. Besides operators for sequential composition, iteration, and selection, which are well-known from regular expressions, they provide parallel composition and iteration, conjunction, and several advanced features like parametric expressions, multipliers, and quantifiers. The paper introduces interaction expressions semi-formally, gives examples of their typical use, and describes their implementation and integration with state-of-the-art workflow technology. Major design principles, such as orthogonality and implicit and predictive choice, are discussed and compared with several related approaches

Record Subtyping in Flexible Relations by means of Attribute Dependencies

The model of flexible relations supports heterogeneous sets of tuples in a strongly typed way. The elegance of the standard relational model is preserved by using a single, generic scheme constructor.In each model supporting structural variants the shape of some part of a heterogeneous scheme may be determined by the contents of some other part of the scheme. We formalize this relationship by a certain kind of integrity constraint we have called "attribute dependency" (AD). We motivate how ADs can be used, besides their application in type and integrity checking, to incorporate record subtyping into our extended relational model Moreover, we show that ADs yield a stronger assertion than the traditional record subtyping rule as they consider interdependencies among refinements. We discuss how ADs are related to query processing and how they may help to identify redundant operations

Incorporating record subtyping into a relational data model

Most of the current proposals for new data models support the construction of heterogeneous sets. One of the major challenges for such data models is to provide strong typing in the presence of heterogenity. Therefore the inclusion of as much as possible information concerning legal structural variants is needed. We argue that the shape of some part of a heterogeneous scheme is often determined by the contents of some other part of the scheme. This relationship can be formalized by a certain type of integrity constraint we have called attribute dependency. Attribute dependencies combine the expressive power of general sums with a notation that fits into relational models. We show that attribute dependencies can be used, besides their application in type and integrity checking, to incorporate record subtyping into a relational model. Moreover, the notion of attribute dependency yields a stronger assertion than the traditional record subtyping rule as it considers some refinements to be caused by others. To examine the differences between attribute dependencies and traditional record subtyping and to be able to predict how attribute dependencies behave under transformations like query language operations we develop an axiom system for their derivation and prove it to be sound and complete. We further investigate the interaction between functional and attribute dependencies and examine an extended axiom system capturing both forms of dependencies

Flexible Relations - Operational Support of Variant Relational Struetures

The relational model is accepted for its simplicity and eIegance. At the other side the simplicity causes the problem, that most semantic type constructs are not representable as a simple relation. Variant and heterogeneous structures belong to those constructs not adequatly supported by the simple relational model. In this paper we give an overview of the model of flexible relations that allows to model and process arbitrary heterogeneous structures, while preserving the relational philosophy of operating with a single constructor. As flexible relations support both the modeling and the operational aspect of variant structures seamlessly, our model truly helps to further bridge the gap between semantic and operational data models. We discuss the structural part of the moQ.el and introduce an algebra for flexible relations. Further we examine a subdass of flexible relations, that can be processed as efficiently as the simple relational model, and show that this subdass possesses desirable structural normal form properties. In addition, we point out that our approach exceeds the objectoriented paradigm in modeling power, typing precision, and query optimization potential