Process and Data: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Abstract

Abstract. Companies increasingly adopt process management technology which offers promising perspectives for realizing flexible information systems. However, there still exist numerous process scenarios not adequately covered by contemporary information systems. One major reason for this deficiency is the insufficient understanding of the inherent relationships existing between business processes on the one side and business data on the other. Consequently, these two perspectives are not well integrated in many existing process management systems. This paper emphasizes the need for both object-and process-awareness in future information systems, and illustrates it along several examples. Especially, the relation between these two fundamental perspectives will be discussed, and the role of business objects and data as drivers for both process modeling and process enactment be emphasized. In general, any business process support should consider object behavior as well as object interactions, and therefore be based on two levels of granularity. In addition, data-driven process execution and integrated user access to processes and data are needed. Besides giving insights into these fundamental characteristics, an advanced framework supporting them in an integrated manner will be presented and its application to real-world process scenarios be shown. Overall, a holistic and generic framework integrating processes, data, and users will contribute to overcome many of the limitations of existing process management technology.

DALEC: a framework for the systematic evaluation of data-centric approaches to process management software

“…It has been acknowledged by various authors that many of the limitations of contemporary PrMSs can be traced back to the missing integration of processes and data [19,49,60,62]. To tackle the issue of integrating data and processes, data-centric approaches have emerged.…”

Linking Data and BPMN Processes to Achieve Executable Models

“…We have built a Java library for this purpose 4 . This library permits loading in compilation time the underlying semantic models of the framework and executing its operations at runtime.…”

“…This has led to conceptual models for data, such as UML class diagrams [1], and conceptual models for processes, such as BPMN [2,3]. Unfortunately these conceptual models are only rarely formally related [4,5]. In fact, they are typically developed by different teams, the data management team and the process management team, respectively, which use their own models and methodologies.…”

Verification of Semantically-Enhanced Artifact Systems

“…This requires to go beyond classical (business) process specification languages, which largely leave the connection between the process dimension and the data dimension underspecified, and to consider data and processes as "two sides of the same coin" [21]. In this respect, artifact-centric systems [19,16] have lately emerged as an effective framework to model business-relevant entities, by combining in a holistic way their static and dynamic aspects.…”