SABPM Workshop
Keynote
Amit Sheth
The 11th Conference on Advanced
Information Systems Engineering
Heidelberg, Germany June 14-18, 1999
in collaboration with
Wil van der Aalst
I. Budak Arpinar
T. Lima and METEOR team
Large Scale Distributed
Information Systems Lab.
University of Georgia
Athens, GA, USA
http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu
Introduction
•
•
•
•
•
Challenges and Opportunities
Current Status: what do we lack now?
Architectural approaches
Technical challenges
Wrap-up
Challenges and Opportunities
New Millennium: Technical Perspective
•
Speed of work and technical developments
•
Distribution – everything and everyone is
connected, logical distance is unrelated to
physical distance
•
Process – increasing ability to cooperate
(coordinate and collaborate)
Acknowledgement: T. Malone/MIT Study, WACC Conference
Challenges and Opportunities
New Millennium: Market Perspective
• Silicon Economics is changing many
industries
– Telecommunications
– Energy Utilities
– Retailing
– Manufacturing
– ...
Resources and innovations will come from
those providing solutions to specific markets/industries
Challenges and Opportunities
Telecommunications...
Challenges and Opportunities
Prelude to the networked economy:
Telecommunications …
The high valuations that the Wall Street has afforded
to new entrants, exceeding $20 billion in valuation in
just two to three years for companies such as Global
Crossing, Level 3 Communications and Qwest
Communications, have fueled entirely new business
models, creating a new breed of global corporations,
that in turn have provided opportunities for applying
information technology to solve the challenges.
Just do it
Analyst Briefing by Level 3 Communications, © Level 3 Communications
Analyst Briefing by Level 3 Communications, © Level 3 Communications
Analyst Briefing by Level 3 Communications, © Level 3 Communications
Convergence or
Next Generation Networks
Single common packet
network for supporting
voice, data, video and
other communications
services (including
VoIP—voice over IP)
Public switched
telephone network
(PSTN) with (packet
switched) data
network
The telecommunications
service providers
Wireless Carriers
ILECs
LD Carriers
ISPs
CLECs
A Critical Role Process
Technology Can Play
•
Two of the most critical success factors
 customer acquisition and retention,
 providing value added features and bundled
services.
Solutions support these two compelling needs invariably
lead to the need for interorganizational workflow processes
because customers prefer to deal with a single service provider,
and most high-value services require integration of what
different types of providers have to offer. Today’s data-centric
solutions are inadequate and inappropriate.
Current Status:
•what has been industry’s approach
to providing workflow solutions?
•what are researcher doing?
•what do we lack now?
Key conclusion from Doculab’s
workflow product comparison study
 Products that allow development of complex
applications, provide flexibility and support
integration are very hard to use, take too long
and require experience programmers (and are
still not quite comprehensive)
 Easy to use products are too restrictive –
and are useful for small or standard
applications only
METEOR EAppS’s objective has been to avoid significant compromise.
Slightly oversimplified observation on
state of the art in Workflow Technology
•
•
Primarily centralized, client/server architectures
•
Static workflows that can be fully defined before
enactment starts
•
Focus on repetitive processes
Difficulty in integrating with existing applications and
databases, not meant for heterogeneous, multi-server
environments
Most products are suitable for many office automation
and other human oriented processes. But QoS for
business- and mission-critical processes is lacking.
Vendor in sectors adding workflow
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Enterprise Application Development & Integration
of current EAI products/solutions
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Broker
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HOST 4
METEOR
Componen
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Database
Transaction
METEOR
Componen
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EDI
METEOR
Componen
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Application
HOST 2
HOST 3
Publish/Subscribe;
event-based messaging
Messaging/Persistent
Queue Middleware
Services and Business Objects
Distributed
Object Management
(ORB)
Enterprise
Java Beans
DCOM
Emergent New Market for
Solutions in the Networked Economy
Research Disciplines Contributing to
Workflow Management
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WASA
METEOR
CRYSTAL
Metuflow
Patha Rei
ETHZ
Etc…etc
Central proposition
•
So far, lion’s share of the attention in Information
Systems has gone to data
•
This attention will increasingly shift to information
and knowledge on the one hand, and processes on
the other
•
We will see process as an organic part of doing a
business-- with e-commerce as the business driver,
processes will be the engine on high-octane fuel to
allow the driver to reach ahead of the competition.
Central proposition
Processes will be chief differentiating and the competitive force in
doing business in the networked economy. They will be deeply
integrated with the way of doing business, and that they will be
critical components of almost all types of systems supporting
enterprise-level and business critical activities.
Architectural Approaches
Evolution of Workflow System
Architectures
Observations/Predictions
•
Workflow process management functions
and technology will be absorbed by other
technologies.
•
The workflow capability will be built in critical
enterprise application systems such as
–
–
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP),
–
–
Future generation of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI),
–
Other middleware services.
Supply-chain management,
E-commerce application builder,
Observations/Predictions
•
•
Adaptability will become one of the key requirements.
•
Outsourcing of workflow management will become an
attractive option.
There will be a shift from data-centric to processcentric knowledge.
Corporations already outsource some of the data related functions
as well as their Web sites: Exodus (http://www.exodus.com)
manages Web sites for large corporations.
Recently, new companies are targeting application outsourcing.
Outsourcing Process Management

Organizations desire to concentrate on core
competencies will lead to outsourcing
process management, especially to support
inter-organizational processes.

Outsourcing of processes will have a
considerable impact on the way
organizations operate.
Outsourcing of Data, Web,
Application and Processes
Impact of Outsourcing
Does workflow technology
have future?

The number of workflow products offered
increased to 200-300 around 1996, and then
started to decline.

The analysts projected an enormous growth,
from $2 billion of the total workflow market to
$7 billion in 2000: this potential does not seem
to have been realized
Lack of Success

There are several explanations for the lack of
success of today's generation of workflow
management systems:
•
Workflow management systems were positioned as
the silver bullet solving all kinds of problems: they
could not meet the expectations.
•
The lack of real standards on the one hand and many
vendors on the other hand has created a scattered
landscape were customers are reluctant to invest in
workflow products.
New Market Segments
Other market segments started to co-opt some of the
workflow capabilities:
 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) started to
increasingly support workflow capabilities.
 Several Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
products currently support limited forms of
workflow capabilities (e.g., Active Software, New Era of Networks, and
CrossWorlds, and Vitria)
.
The average Fortune 2000 company relies on 49 enterprise-level
applications to run its business and spends 25 to 33 percent of its
IT budget just to get them talk to one another.
 Some of the workflow vendors are in the process of
positioning their products in the E-commerce segment.
Has workflow technology failed?
If we narrowly focus on workflow market segment and
predominant vendors of a few years ago: perhaps yes.
However, we see processes as an organic component of
any EAI and E-commerce solution.
•
Looking to the future, we discern two trends:
–
First, vendors are targeting vertical sectors or industry
specific solutions, e.g., telecommunication, healthcare.
–
EAI, and E-commerce, especially in the context of vanishing
corporate boundaries in the networked economy, a new
breed of products will appear to dynamically create and
support virtual communities of commerce partners.
Architecture for
Interorganizational Workflows
•
Internet: the source of value moves from
physical products to digital products.
•
Custom point-to-point integration between
every buyer and supplier is impractical:
transform supply chains into open and
interoperable marketplaces.
Most of the available marketplaces do not have enough facilities
to automate complex business processes. In this respect,
workflow systems should be exploited to model buying
and/or selling processes.
Architecture for Managing
Business Processes
•
Depending on how various stake holders – the
consumers, the intermediaries, and the
suppliers interact, and how the capability of
managing business processes is realized, we
offer architectures for managing business
processes
–
–
–
process portal,
process vortex,
dynamically trading processes.
Process Portal
Intraenterprise
Business
Processes
Enterprise B
Enterprise C
WWW Catalogue
WWW Catalogue
Enterprise A
Cross-enterprise
Business Processes
Buyer
Portal
Process Portal
•
•
•
One-stop shopping for products or information
•
Predefined, (relatively) static business processes
Peer-to-peer interactions
A portal is responsible for carrying out a majority
of activities using the data it has and the
transactions it supports.
A key characteristic of a portal is to own or
manage much of the data and information
it needs to meet its customers needs.
Process Vortex
Vortex Marketplace -1
Enterprise B
Document Exchange
Buy
Content Management & Integration
Buy
Business Services
Trading Partner Registry
Sell/Buy
Sell/Buy
Enterprise C
WWW Catalogue
Document
Document Exchange
Exchange
Enterprise A
Sell
Content
ContentManagement
Management & Integration
Integration
Business
Business Services
Services
Trading
Trading Partner
Partner Registry
Registry
WWW Catalogue
WWW Catalogue
Vortex Marketplace -2
Sell
Process Vortex
•
Interactions among buyers and sellers occur
through governed marketplaces
•
•
•
They focus on very specific product lines
Predefined business processes
Single interface to catalogues and supplier
aggregation
Telecommunications industry: service provider needs to support
different classes of customers (e.g., individual residences, small
businesses, and large businesses) and require flexibility to deal
with a limited set of partners. For example, a CLEC may need
flexibility in leasing network capacities for long distance services
from QWEST communications or Level 3 communications.
Virtual Business Processes
•
A virtual business process of a virtual enterprise, also
referred as interorganizational workflow, goes beyond a
single enterprise boundary and it is constructed by
combining the services provided by different companies
which are collectively called a trading community.
•
Some of the fundamental issues that need to be addressed
to implement a virtual enterprise are:
 How to provide a mechanism whereby companies can advertise
their services, other companies can look at them and, finally,
incorporate these services into their own business process?
 How to execute a virtual process spawning several enterprises
without being managed by one physical enterprise?
Dynamically Trading Processes
Enterprise B
Enterprise C
?
X
WWW Catalogue
WWW Catalogue
Enterprise A
Enterprise D
Virtual
Marketplace -1
WWW Catalogue
?
Virtual
Marketplace -2
WWW Catalogue
?
Dynamically Trading Processes
•
•
•
Many complex interactions among enterprises
•
Participants are a group of semi-autonomous or
autonomous organizations that need to cooperate.
Business processes are highly dynamic
Based on the needs and preferences of a customer, a
virtual process is constructed on the fly to meet this
very particular demand of the customer.
Telecommunications industry: one of the visions of the future networks
includes the facility to allow consumer devices to interact with other devices
and humans on the network in an integrated fashion. The device may be
able to specify a need for a specific type and quality of network services
required and the network dynamically composes a customized process to
allow processing of the request.
Technical Challenges
Technical Challenges
•
•
•
•
•
Modeling and Design
Analysis
Enactment Services
Interoperability
Adaptability
Open Issues for modeling
interorganizational workflows
Integration of
•
Organization modeling
(e.g., in the networked economy, workflow processes will cross
organizational boundaries and these boundaries will become fluid and
subject to continuous change)
•
•
Security Modeling
Data Modeling
Open Issues for Analysis of Workflows
•
None of the commercially available WFMSs offers
verification capabilities, which go beyond trivial
checks such as the absence of an initial task or input
condition.
•
In most WFMSs it is possible to model the
synchronization (i.e., AND-join) of two alternative
paths (i.e., two paths starting with an OR-split) without
any warning at design time: at run-time such a
construct will inevitably result in deadlocks.
•
Research efforts should aim at simulation facilities.
Open Issues for Workflow Enactment
•
•
•
Significant additional research and serious engineering
efforts are needed to improve scalability, exception handling,
automatic recovery, and other QoS criteria.
Building all the capabilities from scratch within a workflow
system without using any state-of-the-art supporting tools is
not an easy task:
–
Iona Technology’s OrbixOTM 3.0 with Java and security
support for E-commerce applications,
–
BEA’s M3 system.
Agent-based workflow management systems still have a
long path ahead before they will effectively address QoS
issues.
Open Issues for Workflow Interoperability
•
Only concrete implementations of standards (e.g.,
SWAP{, jFLOW) can provide real feedback for the
improvement of such interoperability standards.
– Need to go beyond their capabilities (Sync nodes in
METEOR).
•
The interoperability solutions need to evolve towards
multi-protocol and more heterogeneous middleware
environments.
•
The current interoperability specifications do not
support organizational aspects in any significant way.
Open Issues for Adaptability
•
If cases need to be transferred from an existing
process definition to a new process definition,
the use of a replication or a versioning mechanism
will not suffice.
•
The term ‘dynamic change’ refers to the problem
of handling old cases in a new workflow process
definition.
How to transfer cases to a new version of the process?
New concepts and techniques are needed to avoid
anomalies caused by the dynamic change problem.
Summary
•
In the networked economy characterized by speed and
distribution of both technological progress and
business activities, an organic process technology will
provide an integration fabric as well as key
differentiator.
•
Our view:
– Much of the future innovations as well as commercial activities will
come about by the process technology as part of other key products
and solutions, such as in EAI and E-commerce markets, that will
power networked enterprises.
–
On technology side, coordination, collaboration and information
systems will continued to come closer to develop a new class of
technology.
Additional Information
RIDE’99 Proceedeings
Dogac et al NATO ASI Proceedings
A.P. Sheth, W.M.P. van der Aalst, and I.B. Arpinar
Processes Driving the Networked Economy:
Process Portals, Process Vortexes, and Dynamically
Trading Processes