2010 14th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference

The talk starts from a dream/vision paper I published in 2008, whose title is a play on that of John Backus' famous Turing Award Lecture (and paper). I will propose that - or rather ask whether - programming can be made to be a lot closer to the way humans think about dynamics, and the way they manage to get others (e.g., their children, their employees, etc.) to do what they have in mind. Technic... View full abstract»

This paper describes our architecture-based approach to IT valuation. It sketches how different valuation methods can be combined and linked to models of business requirements and enterprise architecture, and how a first part of this approach is realized using Archi Mate and BiZZ design Architect. In this manner, the value and cost of different elements in the architecture can be computed and attr... View full abstract»

Enterprise Architecture models can be used to support IT/business alignment. However, existing approaches do not distinguish between different IT/business alignment situations. Since companies face diverse challenges in achieving a high degree of IT/business alignment, a universal `one size fits all' approach does not seem appropriate. This paper proposes to decompose the IT/business alignment pro... View full abstract»

Enterprise Architecture (EA) models the whole vision of an organisation in various aspects regarding both business processes and information technology resources. As the organisation grows, the architecture governing its systems and processes must also evolve to meet with the demands of the business environment. In this context, a critical issue is change propagation: given a set of primary change... View full abstract»

The paradigm of service orientation is heavily used to design complex IT systems able to satisfy the need for an agile business support. Many enterprises have established service-oriented architectures (SOAs) of different size and complexity. However, such SOAs need efficient management and the discipline of enterprise architecture management has only just begun to reflect the shift from applicati... View full abstract»

With the service-oriented paradigm, some established ways of thinking about software quality and its assurance seem to change. But things do not necessarily become more difficult. Some considerable advancements to traditional ways of quality management can be introduced through the use of service-based systems, leading to largely reduced efforts and increased quality. In this article we identify t... View full abstract»

The formalism Probabilistic Relational Models (PRM) couples discrete Bayesian Networks with a modeling formalism similar to UML class diagrams and has been used for architecture analysis. PRMs are well-suited to perform architecture analysis with respect to system qualities since they support both modeling and analysis within the same formalism. A particular strength of PRMs is the ability to perf... View full abstract»

In this paper we propose a typed approach to business process specification based on typed workflow charts. These can be exploited as a domain-specific programming language and facilitate tight integration between workflow definition and system dialogue programming. The approach also supports the integration of business process modeling and business process automation. We discuss two ways of explo... View full abstract»

Several approaches have already been proposed to extract both business processes and business rules from a legacy source code. These approaches consider static source code analysis for the extraction procedure. However, business processes have components that can not be directly extracted by static analysis (i.e., participants, responsibilities, and concurrent activities). Moreover, well-known sta... View full abstract»

Business processes represent a fundamental asset of a company as they describe the core knowledge underlying its competitive advantage. Tools for modeling and analysis of business processes have to cope with the increasing complexity of these processes. A view on a process intends to abstract from details and make complex processes easier to understand. A process view results from specific transfo... View full abstract»

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizati... View full abstract»

One of the main challenges for enterprise application integration is the semantically correct integration of systems. There are many approaches that aim to address this problem, but most of them focus mainly on technical and syntactical aspects. This paper presents an Ontology-Based Approach for Semantic Integration (OBA-SI), which uses ontologies as conceptual models for defining mappings between... View full abstract»

A constant goal of enterprises of all sizes is to align their business with IT. The major concern is to design the technology to support the desired performance goals and business values. In e-business collaborations, services are becoming the cornerstones for modeling the offerings of the involved parties. However, business concepts, like value offerings, typically cannot be linked to technology ... View full abstract»

Enterprise applications are presently built on a 20-year old data management infrastructure that was designed to meet a specific set of requirements for OLTP systems. In the meantime, enterprise applications have become more sophisticated, data set sizes have increased, requirements on the freshness of input data have been strengthened, and the time allotted for completing business processes has b... View full abstract»