Aligning Architectures of Business and Software: Software Driven by Business Process Models and Its User Interface

摘要

There is still a gap between businesses and their supporting software. Even when an enterprise architecture is defined for a given business, its software is often not aligned to it. If it is reflected in the software at all, then its representation there is mostly in program code rather than models, which makes it difficult to adapt the software. While BPMN provides the possibility to specify business processes in models, executing them with currently available engines does not satisfy the level of usability of traditionally developed software, due to missing context information on business artefacts and context switches for each isolated task execution. We propose a software architecture including a BPMN 2.0 engine and a model of business artefacts for aligning the architectures of the business and its supporting software. It shows how business processes (defined in BPMN) can be enriched at their enactment with additional artefact information. It is consistently presented to the user (in a graphical user interface) based on configuration information attached to business processes or tasks in the software application. It relates the process model with business artefacts in the software much as in an enterprise architecture.