iGoogle duly delivered a reference (but not the referencing blog post) to an interesting IBM Research paper on “providing a new foundation for the Management of Business Operations and Processes”. To summarise (or at least, my interpretion was) :
- activity diagrams (and by extension, process diagrams) are problematic due to the effect of silo-based viewing and cross-process communications
- the key business-level model is the business artifact state model
- state models should be supported by forward chaining business rules to match events to business goals and strategies.
The good news: state models supported by production rules is available today to TIBCO BusinessEvents customers.
The bad news: it seems we have a new IT acronym for such systems: Business Operations Management or BOM. All abbreviations have to be overloaded it seems, so this time it is the turn of Business Object Models to be re-used. In some ways I like the BOM term in the context of operations as (a) it differentiates event-driven tools like BusinessEvents from the more traditional BPEL-focused BPM engines, and (b) supports the idea of Operational Intelligence that CEP tools provide.
Not surprisingly the paper omits to mention TIBCO in the “related work” slides, but it does cover healthcare case management – which hopefully explains our interest in the current discussions on an OMG Case Management standard… (case management being a special case itself of “artifact centric BPM”, a conference on which was the source for the research slides referenced earlier…).
