Abstract:

Business Process Modeling (BPM) is focused on the development of
abstract models of business processes, that can be used as the basis
for managing and partially automating the highly complex operations of
modern enterprises.  In practical application, BPM relies on several
related but separate conceptual models (e.g., requirements,
activity-flow models, information modeling, business rules) for
specifying the operations of an enterprise.  Each of these conceptual
models has differents ways of decomposing the problem space, and the
use of these disparate models adds another layer of complexity to an
already very complex environment.


The notion of "business artifact", introduced by IBM Research in 2003
and arising by different names in various contexts, provides a new and
unified approach to BPM, that can provide a common basis of
understanding across all stakeholders of enterprise operations, and
which provides a unifying basis for the widely used BPM conceptual
models.  Business artifacts are based on an holistic combination of
data and process, that is quite intuitive to business managers yet
enables the incorporation of enough detail to make implementation and
deployment at the IT level relatively straightforward.


This talk presents the notion of business artifact, and describes two
recent applications which highlight some of the key reasons that it is
so effective.  The talk then describes IBM Research's Project
ArtiFact, which is developing a next-generation meta-model of business
artifacts, along with surrounding framework for design, analysis, and
implementation of business operations models.  The new
artifact-centric model is declarative and hierarchical, and holds the
promise of providing a solid foundation for modularizing business rules.

===================


Speaker:


Richard Hull is a Research Staff Member and Manager at the IBM
T.J. Watson Research Center, a position he took in May, 2008.  Hull
has broad research interests in the areas of data and information
management, workflow and business processes, and web and converged
services.  His group is currently performing research on data-centric
workflow and business process management.

Hull is co-author of the book "Foundations of Databases"
(Addison-Wesley, 1996); has published over 100 refereed articles in
journals, conferences and books; and holds seven U.S. patents.  Prior
to joining IBM Research, Hull was Director of Computing and Software
Principles Research at Bell Labs Research, a division of
Alcatel-Lucent.  While there, in addition to pursuing research on
semantic web services, converged services, personalization, and data
management, Hull was instrumental in developing and transferring new
technologies into Alcatel-Lucent's product line, including the Vortex
policy engine and the Datagrid data integration tool.  Before joining
Bell Labs in 1996 he served on the faculty of Computer Science at the
University of Southern California, and was a frequent visitor at INRIA
in France.  His research has been supported in part by grants from
NSF, DARPA, and AT&T.  Hull was named Bell Labs Fellow in 2005 and ACM
Fellow in 2007.