A pivotal-based approach for enterprise business process and IS integration

Abstract

A company must be able to describe and react against any endogenous or exogenous event. Such flexibility can be achieved through business process management (BPM). Nevertheless a BPM approach highlights complex relations between business and IT domains. A non-alignment is exposed between heterogeneous models: this is the ‘business-IT gap’ as described in the literature. Through concepts from business engineering and information systems driven by models and IT, we define a generic approach ensuring multi-view consistency. Its role is to maintain and provide all information related to the structure and semantic of models. Allowing the full return of a transformed model in the sense of reverse engineering, our platform enables synchronisation between analysis model and implementation model.

Keywords:

• operational alignment
• functional integration
• business process management

Notes

 1. Business process modelling notation (Object Management Group 2009).

 2. Business process execution language (OASIS 2007).

 3. Orchestration defines the whole internal steps of a process, including conditions and exceptions. In our case, it can be assimilated to the control-flow of the process.

 4.  http://www.kermeta.org/

 5. Ecore tools component provides a complete environment to create, edit and maintain metamodels on the Eclipse Modeling Framework: http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emft/.

 6. An environment is constituted by actors, tools, etc. needed to design and/or manipulate a target model.

 7. SCALP: Solution pour la Cohérence et l'ALignement des Processus, in French, which means ‘solution for process consistency and alignment’.

 8.  http://www.intalio.com/bpms/designer

 9.  http://www.openerp.com/

10.  http://www.eclipse.org/