Deriving IT Configurations from Business Processes: From the Business Process to the Grounded Model

Identifying proper business processes, formalizing and documenting them has always been a challenge. Maintaining them in synchronization with changing business needs makes the problem harder. It becomes even harder when business processes are fully or partially implemented in IT systems where changes to the business cause changes in IT configurations. This paper presents an approach how IT configurations can be derived from business process definitions. Additional information needs to be supplemented to enable the desired function. This information is made available in form of models about application components and their performance characteristics. A series of transformations has been defined between models that constitute the Model Information Flow. The paper presents the overall approach and demonstrates a use case in the second part. The work is part of ongoing joint research between HP Labs and SAP Research.