Book Review:
J. Wagner,
K. Schwarzenbacher: Förderative Unternehmensprozesse (Federated Business
Processes),
Technologies, Standards and Perspectives of Network Systems, (in German).
With its
focus on technologies for interoperation of inter-organisational
business systems,
the book provides a good source of information on the current state of
the art,
providing a short outlook on the future as well. The authors present a
range of
core concepts for modelling, implementing and monitoring business
processes.
Starting with requirements of business application and their
infrastructure,
several technologies for service oriented architectures are presented
and
methodologies and tools for process design and monitoring of federated
business
processes are described. The main chapters of the book address
technology
related subjects like service-oriented architectures,
workflow-controlled services,
web and grid services, federated data management, information and
communication
portals. Related products and standards are identified.
Federated
business processes are understood by the authors as a concept to
organise
contract-based co-operations between independent organisations, which
support
the exchange of information, products and services. One of the key
advantage of
the concept of federation is the hiding of the internal structure of
the
individual processes and their internal knowledge from the
participating
organisations as much as possible. Only those objects that are to be
exchanged will be
disclosed to
the collaborators. This means partners still have the freedom to change
and
improve their processes without violating the co-operation agreements.
But to
interoperate across organisational boundaries, process interfaces have
to be provided
that enable the desired exchange.
Service-oriented
architectures will use web service- and portlet-based applications as
re-useable building blocks for the design of business processes. These
applications are linked by workflows and use service based
infrastructures to
support their execution. Such architectures can be structured
differently.
Structuring
by server leads to 4-tier architectures with consumer (networks),
portal (web
servers), process (application servers) and resource (data base
servers, etc.)
layers.
Structuring
by abstraction provides an additional structure, which is orthogonal to
the
first one. This has lead to the development of specific infrastructure
services
or middleware.
Structuring
by business objects follows the object-orientation paradigm, allowing
to hide
object internals. However, the authors state the problems with business
objects
due to their undefined behaviour, which will occur in many object
instances.
The latter is due to the multiple interdependencies of object data and
the many
relations between the business objects themselves.
Structuring
by workflows provides isolation between business functionalities and
their connecting
control flow thereby allowing changes to either one without changing
the other.
Products
which are applicable in the different areas mentioned above are
presented from:
BEA Systems, Brainloop, IBM, IDS Scheer, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and
Siebel. A final
chapter
identifies relevant standards defined by industry consortia for the
areas of
communication, workflow, platforms (workflow, web service and
collaboration),
domain models, security and content (access and representation).
Siemens,
Publicis Corporate Publishing,