Reportage on Workshop on Goal Oriented Business Process Modeling

Ilia Bider (IbisSoft, Stockholm) led the 3rd GBPM workshop, in memory of his late collaborator, friend, and co-founder of the workshop, Dr Maxim Khomyakov. The first workshop looked at OO and BPM; the second at practical issues of modelling business processes; and this one focused on Goals-what BPM is all about. Ian Alexander (Independent Consultant) drew the short straw, speaking first straight after the holiday season. He spoke about Modelling the Interplay of Conflicting Goals. A scenario was a sequence of activities to achieve a functional goal desired by an organization, often modelled nowadays as a Use Case. Hostile agents could also have goals which may directly or indirectly threaten the organization's goals; these can be modelled as 'Misuse Cases'. Interactions between Use and Misuse Cases include MC threatens UC; a subsidiary UC mitigates MC; a UC unintentionally aggravates an MC (while perhaps mitigating another); two UCs directly conflict. Depicting agents-possibly systems or parts of the environment (like the weather) as UML stickmen was a useful anthropomorphism; it enabled people to reason with their social brains about agent's goals and how to counter them. The approach led to a simple way of depicting and agreeing on goals, which was useful in specific areas such as design trade-offs and the identification of safety and security requirements. Gil Regev (Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne) spoke about Regulation-based Linking of Strategic Goals and Business Processes. The basic approach is attractively simple: businesses can be considered as control systems intending to maintain a target value, or as organisms with homeostatic goals (such as keeping body temperature constant), influenced negatively by the environment. To my mind it was surprising that neither control nor homeostasis were mentioned; instead, Wiener, Weinberg, Anton, and Checkland were referenced on aspects of systems. Perhaps different communities use different but isomorphic languages to describe goal-oriented behaviour. Constancy or stability sound static, but can be interpreted dynamically (said Ilia Bider) by talking about constancy of growth (e.g. having a Strategic Goal to increase market share). You then get an Operational Goal (e.g. increase sales geographically) which is related to the strategic goal through a Belief that it will help to achieve it-through the operation of a business process (e.g. set up sales forces in new areas). Ilia Bider said both these talks were about the Environment and our understanding of it-which might be true or not; and we could find out if it …