The field of requirements engineering for business processes has grown during the last several years. As business processes are assumed to fulfil organizational goals, goal models could be transformed into business process models that specify how business processes fulfil the organizational goals. Although both the fields of Goal-Oriented RE (GORE) and Business Process Management (BPM) received a lot of attention from researchers, the methods to transform goal models into business process models still need further research. This paper analyses current methods to identify the practical challenges that need to be addressed for an effective transformation of goal models into business process models

Decreus, Ken

Poels, Geert

Snoeck, Monique

English

The field of requirements engineering for business processes has grown during the last several years. As business processes are assumed to fulfil organizational goals, goal models could be transformed into business process models that specify how business processes fulfil the organizational goals. Although both the fields of Goal-Oriented RE (GORE) and Business Process Management (BPM) received a lot of attention from researchers, the methods to transform goal models into business process models still need further research. This scientific evaluation paper analyses current meth-ods to identify the practical challenges that need to be addressed for an effective transformation of goal mod-els into business process models. We illustrate the dis-covered challenges using the case study of Seven-Eleven Japan. The main challenges that were discov-ered are a lack of responsible role, insufficient concept mappings, informality of the transformation algorithm, no full support for organisational structure and a lack of inter-model consistency checks. Our expected con-tribution of discovering these challenges is to lower the barriers of transferring new goal-to-process methods to industry. As we consider i* as the most popular goal modelling language, we limit our study to transforma-tions that start from i* goal models

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

Practical challenges for methods transforming i* goal models into business process models

Practical Challenges for Methods Transforming  i* Goal Models into Business Process Models Ken Decreus1, Monique Snoeck2, Geert Poels1  1 Faculty of Economics and Business Administration,  Ghent University, Belgium 2 Department of Applied Economic Sciences,  Katholieke Universteit Leuven, Belgium  1. Introduction  The field of requirements engineering for business processes has grown during the last several years. As business processes are assumed to fulfil organizational goals, goal models could be transformed into business process models that specify how business processes fulfil the organizational goals. Although both the fields of Goal-Oriented RE (GORE) and Business Process Management (BPM) received a lot of attention from researchers, the methods to transform goal models into business process models still need further research. This paper analyses current methods to identify the practical challenges that need to be addressed for an effective transformation of goal models into business process models. We operationalize our research in the form of a research question Q “What are the challenges for the effective usage of methods transforming i* goal models into business process models?”. The selected RE papers originate from journals and conference proceedings using keywords goal, objective, intention OR purpose in combination (AND) with process OR workflow. More specifically, we selected all papers that employed an i*-based agent-oriented modelling language (SHF [1], KPR [2], KVBKG [3], B-SCP [4], LYM [5], LY [6]).  2. Answers to Research Question  With regard to the research question Q, we will provide an answer from two different perspectives, i.e. the effectiveness ranking of the reviewed methods and the overall practical challenges. The effectiveness ranking of the methods was obtained by summarizing all scores per method, and plotting the sub-scores per property category (displayed by Figure 1). In this way, the sum of the methodological properties and the organisational properties have an equal weight in the final score (individual categories have max. 1, sum is max. 2).  We discovered that B-SCP and KVBKG were the two most effective methods from an overall point of view. B-SCP scores higher with regard to organisational properties while KVBKG scores better on methodological properties. The third place is given to LYM as it enjoys strong organisational properties and good methodological properties. Remaining methods (KPR, LY and SHF) were scored lower on organisational or methodological properties as the first three methods. 00,20,40,60,811,21,4B-SCP KVBKG LYM KPR LY SHFOrganisationalPropertiesMethodological Properties Figure 1. Effectiveness of reviewed methods 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%Context ModellingBusiness-Oriented Process ModelTechnical-Oriented Process ModelLevel of Detail per StepInter-Model ConsistencyFormality of AlgorithmOrganizational StructureConcept MappingsResponsible RoleCLUSTER 1CLUSTER 2 Figure 2. Organisational Challenges   A summary of practical challenges was discovered by adding all scores per variable (expressed in percentage) and ranking the lowest scores at the top (displayed in Figure 2). We discovered two clusters of variables: one cluster of five variables scoring equal or less then 40% and another cluster of four variables scoring equal or more then 60%. The main practical challenges for effective methods transforming i* goal models into business process models are considered to be all variables from the first cluster. In order to tackle these challenges, we recommend authors to provide explicit guidelines, checks and rules for individual method steps, as demonstrated by the PRiM method of Grau et al. [7]. The current best ‘tool’ to perform goal to business process translation would be the combination of the work of Koliadis et al. (KVBKG [3]) and Bleistein et al. (B-SCP [4]).  3. References  [1] M. Séguran, C. Hébert, and G. Frankova, "Secure Workflow Development from Early Requirements Analysis," in The 6th IEEE European Conference on Web Services, 2008. [2] R. Kazhamiakin, M. Pistore, and M. Roveri, "A Framework for Integrating Business Processes and Business Requirements," in Proceedings of the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, Eighth IEEE International: IEEE Computer Society, 2004. [3] G. Koliadis, A. Vranesevic, M. Bhuiyan, A. Krishna, and A. Ghose, "Combining i* and BPMN for Business Process Model Lifecycle Management," in Business Process Management Workshops, 2006, pp. 416-427. [4] S. J. Bleistein, K. Cox, J. Verner, and K. T. Phalp, "B-SCP: A requirements analysis framework for validating strategic alignment of organizational IT based on strategy, context, and process," Information and Software Technology, vol. 48, pp. 846-868, 2006. [5] A. Lapouchnian, Y. Yu, and J. Mylopoulos, "Requirements-Driven Design and Configuration Management of Business Processes," in Business Process Management, 2007, pp. 246-261. [6] A. Lo and E. Yu, "From Business Models to Service-Oriented Design: A Reference Catalog Approach," in Conceptual Modeling - ER 2007, 2008, pp. 87-101. [7] G. Grau, X. Franch, and N. A. M. Maiden, "PRiM: An i*-based process reengineering method for information systems specification," Information and Software Technology, vol. 50, pp. 76-100, 2008.   

The field of requirements engineering for business processes has grown during the last several years. As business processes are assumed to fulfil organizational goals, goal models could be transformed into business process models that specify how business processes fulfil the organizational goals. Although both the fields of Goal-Oriented RE (GORE) and Business Process Management (BPM) received a lot of attention from researchers, the methods to transform goal models into business process models still need further re-search. This scientific evaluation paper analyses cur-rent methods to identify the practical challenges that need to be addressed for an effective transformation of goal models into business process models. We illus-trate the discovered challenges using the case study of Seven-Eleven Japan. The main challenges that were discovered are a lack of responsible role, insufficient concept mappings, informality of the transformation algorithm, no full support for organisational structure and a lack of inter-model consistency checks. Our ex-pected contribution of discovering these challenges is to lower the barriers of transferring new goal-to-process methods to industry. As we consider i * as the most popular goal modelling language, we limit our study to transformations that start from i * goal mod-els

Ken Decreus

Monique Snoeck

Geert Poels

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Practical Challenges for Methods Transforming i* Goal Models into Business Process Models

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Practical challenges for methods transforming i* goal models into business process models

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Ghent University Academic Bibliography

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

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