Deriving Normalized Systems Elements from Business Process Models

Abstract

Normalized Systems theory has recently been established to engineer evolvable information systems. In order to build information systems according to this theory, a method to identify the normalized systems' primitives has to be constructed. Because business processes are currently receiving more attention as process-centric representations of an enterprise, this method should be able to translate business process models into the normalized systems primitives. In this paper, a preliminary mapping method based on proven software engineering principles, is discussed. The proposed method adheres to the normalized systems' viewpoint of business processes being normalized production lines. In this sense, business process production lines are identified as workflow elements operating on a single type of data element. These process lines are operated as state machines, triggering action elements on the specified data element. The mapping method is illustrated using an example of a realistic business process flow. Some initial conclusions on the method construction are presented.

Consistency, Complementalness, or Conflictation of Enterprise Ontology and Normalized Systems Business Process Guidelines

“…On the business process level, it has been argued that business processes at their most basic level (i.e., the "elementary tasks and elementary sequencing and design of these tasks" (Van Nuffel, 2011)) can be considered to be modular structures as well. In this context, business processes have been compared to production lines (Van Nuffel et al, 2009a). In this analogy, a business process flow performs operations on instances of a specific life cycle information object.…”

Constructing Evolvable Enterprise Implementations

“…Besides the coordination acts, we also need to provide an implementation for the production act Execute. At this point, an issue surfaces as the Normalized Systems theory prescribes that a flow is concerned with precisely one data element (Mannaert and Verelst, 2009;Van Nuffel et al, 2009a). If the execution of the production act does not require any actions to be performed on other data elements, the production act will be designed as an action element on the same data element.…”

“…Third, in case of an rejected request, the initiator will probably have to be notified. This functionality is represented by a bridge action Refuse executing the notification in the way as discussed in (Van Nuffel et al, 2009b). In case of an allowed cancelation, the CancelTransaction standard action element will initiate the cancelation handling which will be explained next.…”

Normalization of Domain Modeling in Enterprise Software Development

“…New normalization theories -Normalization Process Theory (NPT), Normalized Systems Theory (NST) and Norm Analysis method (NA) have emerged in different, however, co-related areas of organizational management, organizational modeling, and requirements engineering (Van Nuffel et al, 2009), (Murray et al, 2010), (Mannaert et al, , 2011, (Eessaar, 2014), (Linden et al, 2012), , (Tan et al, 2004), (Chong and Liu, 2000).…”