The Role of Messaging in Collaborative Business Processes

Business process management technologies are considered as one of the key success stories in providing process control and addressing complex integration requirements. However, the expectation of what this technology must deliver is a moving target. What was true for workflow systems is no longer acceptable in the dynamic and cross organizational requirements for management of collaborative processes. Whereas the success of coordinative processes depends upon the conformance to the prescribed control flow, the success of the collaborative process depends upon the ability to detect and react to changing conditions. In this paper we highlight the differences between the well known coordinative and emerging collaborative processes and present key distinguishing characteristics. We further deliberate on the widely established role of messaging as an enabling technology for inter and intra process communication. Acknowledging the role of messaging, and the distinct requirements posed by collaborative processes, we question the appropriateness of current control flow driven approaches and propose an alternative mode of thought for addressing the modeling and execution of collaborative business processes. This paper is not intended to present a complete solution of the alternative approach, but to identify it as a viable research direction and a potentially more appropriate approach. Introduction Collaborative business process technologies are firmly positioned as an industry hot spot due to the increasing demands from the business sector for effective management of outsourced business activities and ability to control cross-enterprise processes. It is well known that this demand brings with it complex integration requirements that span interoperability across multi-platform systems, to semantic differences in business terminology. Historically speaking, process enablement has been a driver for enterprise systems for a significant period of time. The pitfalls of functional over-specialization and lack of overall process control has been well documented. Technology response to this business * The work reported in this paper is jointly supported by the Australian Research Council, SAP Research and The University of Queensland, under the Harmonized Messaging Technology project demand was met with a suite of technologies, ranging from groupware and office automation, to workflow systems, and more currently business process management technologies. In Figure 1, we show building blocks of process-enabled enterprise systems. Just as the DBMS provided a means of abstracting application logic from data logic, the WFMS provided a means of abstracting coordinative process logic from application logic. Every generation has provided additional functionality through supporting systems. Although, workflow technology has delivered a great deal of productivity improvements, it has been mainly for pre-defined static and repetitive business processes, that required basic level of coordination between human performers and some application components. More recently business process management (BPM) has been used as a broader term to reflect the fact that a business process may or may not involve human participants and may also cross organizational boundaries. There is currently a wide spread interest in academia and industry on business process management technologies, especially in light of emerging paradigms surrounding web services and their application in dynamic business process composition. There are a number of standards and initiatives in this regard generally focused on the problem of B2B process integration [2]. Figure 1. Building Blocks of Process-Enabled Enterprise Systems Key guiding principles behind process-enabled systems include: • A clear separation of Process, Business, Data, and Presentation aspects of enterprise systems with minimal overlap. • Status, instance, and context management are an intrinsic part of overall process management architecture. • Process Modeling is an integral and essential part of systems development and deployment lifecycle. • Business processes are primarily captured through modeling and business logic is primarily implemented through coding of application components. • Application components have minimal direct awareness of one another and also have minimal direct awareness of “where and how” they are being utilized in BPM layer. • BPM takes the primary responsibility to achieve business objectives through configuration, coordination, collaboration, and integration of application components. • Clear mapping between design time conceptual modeling environment to capture ‘real life’ business processes and runtime execution environment supported by IT infrastructure. • Similar BPM principles are applied in achieving intra-application, application to application, system to system, as well as business to business integration Role of Messaging Technologies in BPM Messaging technologies play a key role in current BPM platforms. This role is primarily that of facilitating interactions between partner organizations running potentially heterogeneous systems. Message oriented middleware is known to tackle some key issues of cross enterprise data exchange, without violating individual system autonomy. We explain this further by introducing a BPM architecture that utilizes the concept of a BPM Object. In this architecture, application components are exposed as BPM objects, which may have public method interface and/or messaging interface. This concept allows us to use the same BPM Object as an interaction bridge between application components and BPM technologies whether we want to make method calls to application components or let messages derive the interaction. Figure 2(a) illustrates the position of BPM objects in the overall process enabled enterprise system, and Figure 2(b) shows a more detailed view of the BPM object. (a) Role of a BPM Object (b) Interfaces for BPM Object Figure 2.BPM Objects Business Process Management Process Enactment Engine Messaging Service Application Components BPM Objects Messaging Interface Database Process Logic