Aligning Business Processes With the Services Layer Using a Semantic Approach

Abstract

Organizations require their business processes goals and the underlying information technology (IT) to be in synchronization with each other, but the continual changes in business processes makes this difficult. To accomplish this synchronization, there needs to be an alignment between the business processes and the IT. Business processes are currently defined using such well-known notations as BPMN, and the IT is made available by different services. Hence, the alignment process can be defined as one between the organization’s BPMNs and the services provided by its IT. In practice, however, this process is a complex task which is carried out by hand and hence is error prone. The present communication analyzes the conditions, relations, and incompatibilities between BPMNs and the service descriptions. The incompatibilities are formalized mathematically in order to facilitate their identification and resolution. Then, an alignment process is defined taking into account these incompatibilities and their solutions. The wrapper code needed to resolve each incompatibility identified during the alignment process is generated automatically. Finally, a case study is presented to validate and illustrate the use of the proposed alignment process. The results provided by the semiautomatic alignment process were similar to those obtained manually by a group of experts.