a data-centric design methodology for business strongprocessesstrong.pdf

A Data-Centric Design Methodology for Business Processes Kamal Bhattacharya Richard Hull Jianwen Su IBM T.J. Watson IBM T.J. Watson UC Santa Barbara Abstract This chapter describes a design methodology for business processes and workflows that focuses first on “business artifacts”, which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, including both the business-relevant data about them and their macro-level lifecycles. Individual workflow services (a.k.a. tasks) are then incorporated, by specifying how they operate on the artifacts and fit into their lifecycles. The resulting workflow is specified in a particular artifact-centric workflow model, which is introduced using an extended example. At the logical level this workflow model is largely declarative, in contrast with most traditional workflow models which are procedural and/or graph-based. The chapter includes a discussion of how the declarative, artifact-centric workflow specification can be mapped into an optimized physical realization. 1. INTRODUCTION Most traditional workflow models are based on a procedural and/or graph-based paradigm for specifying how a business process or workflow is supposed to operate, and methodologies to design workflows in those models are typically founded on a process-centric perspective. This chapter describes a fundamentally different approach to workflow design, which is founded on a data-centric perspective, and which is especially useful for designing the detailed operation of business processes for enterprises in the modern era. The first major step in this data-centric approach is t