Business-driven Development Research Articles

IMI's Aspire program feeds its senior leader pipeline through self‐nominations

AbstractSelf‐nominations, combined with sophisticated assessment and selection tools, have produced a more diverse pool of highly qualified talent that IMI, a worldwide engineering company, is now grooming for its top 40 senior leadership roles. A three‐step nomination and selection process for the enterprise‐level Aspire program includes 360‐degree‐type performance assessments; online testing of potential that measures foundational capabilities and predispositions as well as accelerators in order to assign a norm‐based percentile standing; and an assessment center with simulations for gauging readiness for senior leadership roles. Those selected as Aspire participants are afforded a range of activities, geared to individual and organizational needs, that include training/education, on‐the‐job and business‐driven development, and relationship‐driven development. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Role of Visual Modeling and Model Transformations in Business-driven Development

This paper explores the emerging paradigm of business-driven development, which presupposes a methodology for developing IT solutions that directly satisfy business requirements and needs. At the core of business-driven development are business processes, which are usually modeled by combining graphical and textual notations. During the business-driven development process, business-process models are taken down to the IT level, where they describe the so-called choreography of services in a Service-Oriented Architecture. The derivation of a service choreography based on a business-process model is simple and straightforward for toy examples only—for realistic applications, many challenges at the methodological and technical level have to be solved. This paper explores these challenges and describes selected solutions that have been developed by the research team of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

Business-driven application security: From modeling to managing secure applications

Business-driven development and management of secure applications and solutions is emerging as a key requirement in the realization of an on demand enterprise. In a given enterprise, individuals acting in various roles contribute to the modeling, development, deployment, and management of the security aspects of a business application. We look at the business-application life cycle and propose a policy-driven approach overlaid on a model-driven paradigm for addressing security requirements. Our approach suggests that security policies are to be modeled using policies and rule templates associated with business processes and models, designed and implemented through infrastructure-managed or application-managed environments based on modeled artifacts, deployed into an infrastructure and potentially customized to meet the security requirements of the consumer, and monitored and managed to reflect a consistent set of policies across the enterprise and all layers of its application infrastructure. We use a pragmatic approach to identify intersection points between the platform-independent modeling of security policies and their concrete articulation and enforcement. This approach offers a way to manage and monitor systems behavior for adherence and compliance to policies. Monitoring may be enabled through both information technology (IT) and business dashboards. Systematic approaches to connect business artifacts to implementation artifacts help implement business policies in system implementations. Best practices and security usage patterns influence the design of reusable and customizable templates. Because interoperability and portability are important in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, we list enhancements to standards (e.g., Business Process Execution Language [BPEL], Unified Modeling Language™ [UML®]) that must be addressed to achieve an effective life cycle.

Legacy Asset Management

The magnitude of legacy expenditures and their business impact challenge IS managers to both increase the value derived from legacy assets and free up resources for supporting new applications. A coordinated approach that integrates legacy perspectives, processes, applications, and infrastructures with the business-driven development needed in today’s hybrid computing environments helps IS managers meet those challenges.