Engineering And Deployment Of Cooperative Information Systems

Engineering and Deployment of Cooperative Information Systems

Workflow Patterns

A comprehensive guide to well-known workflow patterns: recurrent, generic business process constructs, described from the control-flow, data, and resource perspectives. The study of business processes has emerged as a highly effective approach to coordinating an organization's complex service- and knowledge-based activities. The growing field of business process management (BPM) focuses on methods and tools for designing, enacting, and analyzing business processes. This volume offers a definitive guide to the use of patterns, which synthesize the wide range of approaches to modeling business processes. It provides a unique and comprehensive introduction to the well-known workflow patterns collection—recurrent, generic constructs describing common business process modeling and execution scenarios, presented in the form of problem-solution dialectics. The underlying principles of the patterns approach ensure that they are independent of any specific enabling technology, representational formalism, or modeling approach, and thus broadly applicable across the business process modeling and business process technology domains. The authors, drawing on extensive research done by the Workflow Patterns Initiative, offer a detailed introduction to the fundamentals of business process modeling and management; describe three major pattern catalogs, presented from control-flow, data, and resource perspectives; and survey related BPM patterns. The book, a companion to the authoritative Workflow Patterns website, will be an essential resource for both academics and practitioners working in business process modeling and business process management.

Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems

Over recent years most business processes have changed in various dimensions (e. g. , ?exibility, interconnectivity, coordination style, autonomy) due to market conditions, organizational models, and usage scenarios of information systems. Frequently, inf- mationisrelocatedwithinageographicallydistributedsystemaccordingtorulesthatare only seldom de?ned as a well-codi?ed business process. This creates the need for a so- ware infrastructure that enables ubiquitous mobile and collaboration systems (UMICS). The anywhere/anytime/any means paradigm is becoming the major challenge in conceiving, designing, and releasing next-generation information systems. New te- nologies, like wi-? networks and 3rd-generation mobile phones, are offering the infr- tructure to conceive of information systems as ubiquitous information systems, that is, systems that are accessible from anywhere, at any time, and with any device. Ubiquity is not yet another buzzword pushed by emerging technologies, but is mainly a means to support new business models and encourage new ways of working. This new wave of UMICS will exploit the knowledge developed and deployed for conventional infor- tion systems, but will also need new concepts, models, methodologies, and supporting technologies to fully exploit the potentials of the enabling infrastructure and to be ready for the challenge. Moreover, people need to move across organizational boundaries and collaborate with others within an organization as well as between organizations. The ability to query the company’s distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but mobility brings new access scenarios and higher complexity.