1st BPMDS (BPMDS'98) workshop on: Object-Oriented Business Process Modeling

Organizers foreword by Ilia Bider

Business Application Development for 21 Century:

Human-Assisted Reality Tolerant Systems

Any business application, or in fact any computer system, can be evaluated from two major aspects:

• Functionality, and
• Quality

Functionality determines the usefulness of the system to the end-user, while quality determines the tolerance to changes in business environment and computer technology.

Nowadays, we can observe a shift in the system requirements that concern both functionality, and quality.

Shift in functionality may be described as transition from the systems that are essentially human-assisting to those that are human-assisted. A human-assisting system helps a human being only to perform certain functions, e.g. write a letter, print an invoice, etc. Connection between those functions, and the objective of the whole process is beyond the system understanding. This is a prerogative of the human participant. In a human-assisted system, the roles are reversed, the system knows the process and does all bookkeeping. When the system can’t perform an action on its own, it’ll ask the human participant for help. The difference between old and new generations in functionality is essential and can be traced in all other aspects of system development:

We live in the world that changes faster and faster. The changes concern both business reality and technology. As the changes happen during the system lifetime, the system should possess a degree of "reality tolerance", i.e. adaptability to both kinds of changes. To reach proper adaptability, the system should be built on:

1. Solid conceptual model for representing business processes that allows to easily redefine processes when the business reality changes.
2. Properly layered software structure, so that in case of advances in technology, only one layer needs to be changed at a time.
3. Conceptual model being logically as much as possible separated from the software structure, so that changes in the software structure and business model could be made independently of each other.

In current practice, those 3 principles do not receive equal attention. For example, the second principle often prevail as a leading principle of software development which results in applications where the business model (if any) is not clearly separated from the software. However, all three should be strictly followed to achieve the goal of building reality tolerant systems.

Combining new requirements on system functionality and system quality, we get a concept of Human-Assisted Reality Tolerant Systems (HARTS). The key to achieving those properties lies in Business Process Modeling, which is the main topic of our workshop.