Section: Scientific Foundations

Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is considered as a core discipline behind Service Management and Computing. BPM, that includes the analysis, the modelling, the execution, the monitoring and the continuous improvement of enterprise processes is for us a central domain of studies.

A lot of efforts has been devoted in the past years to established standards business process models founded on well grounded theories (e.g. Petri Nets) that meet the needs of both business analyst but also of software engineers and software integrators. This has lead to heated debate as both points of view are very difficult to reconciliate between the analyst side and the IT side. On one side, the business people in general require models that are easy to use and understand and that can be quickly adapted to exceptional situations. On the other side, IT people need models with an operational semantic in order to be able transform them into executable artifacts. Part of our work has been an attempt to reconcile these point of views, leading on one side to the Bonita product and more recently on our work in crisis management where the same people are designing, executing and monitoring the process as it executes. But more generally, and at a larger scale, we have been considering the problem of process spanning the barriers of organisations. This leads us to consider the more general problem of service composition as a way to coordinate inter organisational construction of application providing value based on the composition of lower level services [26] .