THE EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AND

STANDARDS ON BPM AND THE SOCIO-

TECHNICAL APPROACHES: CONTRIBUTIONS
TO COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS



Cludio Sapateiro
Patricia Macedo
Escola Superior de Tecnologia
Instituto Politcnico de Setbal
{csapateiro;pmacedo}@est.ips.pt





In the last 15 years, initiatives aiming to improve Business Process
Management (BPM) have increased significantly. Agility, distribution and
interoperability are BPM requirements for the emergent new organizational
forms, which have an important role in providing distributed shared process
management. In collaborative activities,, it is extremely relevant the
interactions between several actors for the process success. In order to develop
information system that efficiently support collaborative activities this
interactions should be contemplated during system specification. The recently
emerged/adopted socio-technical approaches to systems development have
contributed with theories and methods which allow contemplating the social
environment lived in organization(s), in systems specification.
This paper analyze how the current BMP initiatives and social-technical
approaches can contribute to the digital information systems development
process, in order to address the main characteristics of a collaborative
environment


1. INTRODUCTION

Based on the continuous technological evolution different architectures of
information systems had emerged, each one supported by different approaches
concerning the new challenges that arise.
Systems have evolved from the old days data centric models to systems
developed with a business processes perspective (Smith, 2004)(Jablonski, 2001),
based on service oriented architectures (SOA) (Bea, 2005)(Avantys, 2005) with
organization integration in mind (Smith, 2002)(Srinivasan, 2005).
This perspective has origined the recent Business Processes Management
Systems (BPMS), whose had contributions from the Workflow Management
Hollingsworth, 2004)(Chebbi, 2004), SOA (Tibco, 2005) and Enterprise Application
Integration (EAI) (Smith, 2002) disciplines.







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The new BPMS aims an agile and flexible description of business processes in
order to face the current market dynamics and demands.In fact, the emergence of
new organizational forms as Networked Production, Clusters and Virtual
Organizations, Professional Virtual Communities, where several organizational
entities have to share the management of distributed processes, brings several
additional challenges to business process management. Considering the example of
Collaborative Product Design, it is extremely relevant the interactions between
several actors for the process success. In this kind of process a set of informal
contacts are usually established.
Nevertheless, most of the focus, of the actual BPMS is in service composition
and automation and less in human activities, in particular the informal ones.
Informal activities are those who werent capture in system requirements/design and
by so, operate at outside the developed system which doesnt support them.
So, are the currently used methodologies with the wrong focus on systems
requirement capture/gathering?
In opposition to the traditional structured approaches such as UML/UP (Silva,
2001) we have, nowadays, agile methodologies for project development, like XP
and SCRUM (Schwaber, 2004). Although these methodologies present agile/flexible
process for systems development, the end product often lacks on agility/flexibility
itself, because the focus/perspective in the system analysis and requirements gather
and specification do not capture de social and cultural environment presented in the
organization, and in which the business processes are executed. Usually they gather
and describe functionalities, rigid procedures/tasks for actors that lead, for example,
to the necessity of exception handling in many workflow systems.
In (Charette, 2005) are presented failure cases of systems development and
implementation. In spite of several studies identify frequent problems and their
consequences in systems development, the failure cases continue.
Some of the causes that lead to projects failure pointed by (Charette, 2005) are:
Non realistic or not articulated objectives
Badly driven requirements capture
Problems in dealing with project complexity
These causes often lead to:
Missing important systems requirements/functionalities
Lack of usability
Socio-technical approaches to systems development have emerged recently, in
order to address the issues described above,. These approaches aims to contemplate
in systems specification the social environment lived in organization(s).
As collaborative environments present intensive interactions between actors, digital
technologies and modeling techniques should address this as a requirement.
The goal of this paper is to analyze how the current BMP initiatives and social-
technical approaches can contribute to the digital information systems development
process, in order to address the main characteristics of a collaborative environment..
In section 2 we describe the current BPM initiatives. Section 3 present socio-
technique approaches and in section 4 we propose a methodology based on the
discussion of the contributions of both approaches to information systems
development. Section 5 presents conclusions from this work and future research
agenda on the topic.








The emerging Technologies and Standards on BPM and the socio-technical
approaches: Contributions to collaborative environments
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2. BPM INITIATIVES

As stated in the previous section, there are currently three main contribution areas
for Business Process Management Systems (BPMS): Workflow Management,
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).
The workflow line of thought sees organizations structured as associated roles
and responsibilities, it consider both human and systems as resources
(Hollingsworth, 2004). Processes are sequence of activities (or in some cases
sequences of other processes) governed by business rules in which each have a
responsibility role associated as well as resources.
Workflow systems tend to be centralized and hard coded and typically present
limited connectivity to other Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) or BPMS.
So, they are becoming not as suitable for dynamic business processes as required in
collaborative environments.
The Inter-Organizational branch of workflow, addresses some issues related with
relationships between partners in collaborative processes, (Chebbi, 2004) (Chebbi,
2004a) like public and private views of the shared processes, but still misses
flexibility in processes and local autonomy of participants.
Enterprise Applications Integrations (EAI) addresses a key requirement of
Distributed Business Process Management Systems (DBPMS): interoperability
(Smith, 2004) however the EAI approach focuses on technical issues in order to
achieve activities/processes automation which is not particularly adequate in the
human involvement/interactions characterization.
Respecting to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), a process can be composed
by a set of exposed services on the network that can be executed in a highly
distributed manner (BEA, 2005). SOA aims increasing business agility (Srinivasan,
2005) by enabling IT departments to reuse services that have known scalability and
quality of service characteristics. Such reuse can help reduce time to market as well
as development costs. SOA may be implemented in different technologies but the
most popular (and supported by standards) is Web Services (WS) based (Papazolou,
2004) (Oracle, 2004). SOA addresses the lack of connectivity experienced in the
workflow systems and the lack of management services in EAI.
Concluding, actual BPMS use a unified vision of the SOA and Workflow
process definition, this process centric approach aims to formally describe processes
in order to translate them to a level of direct execution in process execution engines.


3. SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

The emergence of the socio-technical approaches to systems development aims to
capture and specify systems requirements considering the social environment and
organizational culture lived in the context of business processes execution.
As stated, before informal activities often affect the execution and performance
of business processes. These activities are hardly modelled in traditional
approaches/methodologies. This issue has been addressed by initiatives like Genre
Analysis (Spinuzi, 2003) (Yates and Orliskowski, 1992)(Yates and Orliskowski,







4 Digital Enterprise Technology

2002)(Saunders and Chiasson, 2005); Thinklets, representing collaboration patterns
(Briggs et al, 2003)(Gwendolyn et al, 2004); Contexts (Zacarias et al, 2005)(Elst et
al, 2001)(Bouqet et al, 2002); Actor Network and Social Actors Networks theories
(Pinho and Soares, 2005)(Pereira and Soares, 2005)(Anklam, 2005)(Groth,
2002)(Martinez et al, 2004).
Genre Analysis is particularly adopted to study communication patterns of non
formal communications and ad-hoc work structures (Antunes et al, 2006). A genre
may be defined as a taxonomic collection of speech or written text types showing
the systematic use of genre elements (which describes the kind of element based on
form or content properties) (Lacey, 2000).
Another viewpoint considers communicative purpose as a fundamental property
of genres (Yates and Orlikowski, 2002). Here, a genre is a template for action
enacted within a community to accomplish a socially recognized purpose.
Thinklets constitute elementary units of intellectual capital to create and repeat
patterns in collaboration processes among people with a common objective. The
thinklets may be categorized accordingly collaboration patterns and may constitute
the building blocks in the specification of informal activities (Gwendolyn et al,
2004).
Thinklets are in the genesis of a new research area called collaboration
engineering. Thinklets were suggested in first place to document and reuse
collaboration patterns in group support systems (GSS) e.g. electronic meeting
systems (EMS). Here we propose the extension of the thinklet concept to
collaboration within business processes execution context.
In the Contexts research it is emphasized the concern of modelling information
needs of actors during their tasks execution attending the context they are in
(Zacarias et al, 2005). This line of thought explores the context notion in
organizational models based in the contributions of the classical engineering and
social approaches to context.
Approaches based on Actor Network and Social Actor Network theories focuses
on identifying the existing relations between actors during their participation in
business processes execution. These approaches suggest a network of inter-relations
representation and provide some parameters (centrality, collaboration potential,
maximal flow, etc.) to assess/characterize this relation (Pereira and Soares, 2005).
In fact some of these initiatives arent yet in a mature state to embrace
professional/practical projects (e.g. contexts, thinklets) others like Genre Analysis
and SAN presents very specific applications like in (Antunes et al, 2006)(Pereira
and Soares, 2005) but they lack of holistic approach in relation with organizational
architecture..


4. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY

In this work we consider a information system development process divided in five
main phases: requirements capture and specification, modelling, design,
development and deployment. These phases compose an iterative and incremental
process in which, one of our main objectives, is that it could be flexible and agile
due the focus/description adopted in our modelling approach.







The emerging Technologies and Standards on BPM and the socio-technical
approaches: Contributions to collaborative environments
5

Attending the design and development phases of an information system project,
the BPM initiatives contribute to develop agile/modular systems operation and
promote existing services reuse.
Nevertheless, the modelling and systems requirements capture, specification and
also design phases, should consider the social-technical approaches in order to
embrace the informal activities that may be part of business processes execution. At
these phases its essential to understand interaction among participants in order to:
achieve a real/effective processes structure,
identify vital people and activities in processes executions,
and perceive knowledge flows and path ways.
Questions like: How often a participant receive information from each of the
others that he need to do to his work?, How well a participant understands the
knowledge, skills, and experience of each of the other people?, should be answered
to achieve the social network representation. With a social network representation
we can visualize/identify relations that help or constrain collaboration and
information sharing processes. It also allows the identification of actors, who
perform main roles or isolated ones, bottlenecks in information flow and
communication (formal and informal) channels. As stated in section 2, social
networks have several variables available that helps analyze the network in order to
infer about the mentioned issues.
Figure 1 represents in a graphical way, the mapping between system
development phases and contributions from social-technical approaches and BPMS
initiatives.


Requirements
capture and
specification

Design

Modelling

Development
Should contemplate a
Socio-Technical contributions
Use BPMS contributions

Deployment


Figure1 Map between development phases and different contributions

One discipline that can contribute to gather needed information in order to
achieve an effective social network representation is Genre Analysis (GA). GA
claims that the work structures (including informal ones) may be inferred by
inquiring about communicative actions. The observed communicative actions,
materialized through: memos, reports, emails, phone calls, etc. are analysed/related
(Yates and Orlikowski, 2002; Yoshioka, et al. 2001) and aggregated in a genre
system trying to explain work patterns (Antunes et al, 2006). This can be done by
several techniques e.g. document analysis, interviews, contextual inquiry, etc.
(Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998)







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Once identified, informal activities, work structures and relations, across
functional and organizational boundaries, we should focus on:
Evaluate their impact in BP performance
Consider them in BP management (in a agile manner)
Represent the organizational knowledge/culture/social environment
Define the needs of information in a contextualized manner at
operational level (in order to increase productivity and responsiveness)
Contemplate procedures and information needs in the ICT infra-
structure
By adopting the proposed methodology we embrace an additional task in the
project development which is the translation of the model which considers the social
environment to the model for services description that will provide the operational
execution support of the business processes. Thinklets may be a form to represent
the bridge between these two models.
The identified activities, work structures, communications and relations may be
represented as a choreographed set of thinklets. This set may include existing
(mature) thinklets and new developed ones (representing/documenting this way in a
structured manner the identified patterns).
In the field of research of collaboration engineering, the concept of thinklets
have evolved from a more technological proximity, to a superior
abstraction/technological independence level (Gwendolyn et al, 2004). We propose
that each thinklet constitute a guide to form a set of choreographed (available or
new) services that implements the thinklet.
If service orientation architecture is used it have the advantage of being an
architecture already prepared to choreograph services, deal with internal and
external resources (including human) and integration in a modular manner.


5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

One of the goals of this work is to show that in the development of information
systems requirements gather and specification, as well as, design phases, must move
its concerns to the social relations between participants and their informal activities.
Social informal interactions exist and in order to be manageable, measured and their
impact on business processes performance evaluated, they should be contemplated
in system modelling.
In this paper we have discuss the recent business process management systems
initiatives and had concluded that these initiatives play an important role in design
and development phases to achieve agile, distributed and interoperable systems.
Nevertheless, related to system modelling this initiatives lacks in concerning
informal activities.
In the methodology proposed we aim to guide the system development process,
first by modelling based on social-technical approaches and then developing in an
agile, flexible, service oriented way recurring to BPMS initiatives. To link this to
paradigms, we suggest the use of thinklets that at lower level could be implemented
as a service composition and at a higher level could be (re)used to represent
collaborative patterns.







The emerging Technologies and Standards on BPM and the socio-technical
approaches: Contributions to collaborative environments
7

As a future research agenda we suggest that it is also necessary to evaluate the
models proposed in psycho-sociology discipline (Ferreira et al, 2001) they may
contribute to systems specification/representation with its models of work
satisfaction/motivation, productivity, leadership and team work. In these theories the
complementarities and interdependence of social and technical subsystems, as well
as, individual vs collective and organization vs environment, are well documented.
When one consider relations (informal or not) we must support the knowledge
generation, representation and sharing needs, so in future, we should also consider
contributions from semantic web (Sure et al, 2002) and ontologies development
areas to knowledge representation.


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