1Workshop on BusinessDriven Enterprise Application Design

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How to Describe Workflow Information Systems to
Support Business Process
Josefina Guerrero García, Jean Vanderdonckt,
Christophe Lemaige, Juan M. González
Calleros Université catholique de Louvain
(UCL) Louvain School of Management
(LSM) Information Systems Unit (ISYS) Place des
Doyens, 1 B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
(Belgium) http//www.isys.ucl.ac.be/
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Outline

• Introduction
• State of the art
• Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information
  Systems
• How to Generate the User Interfaces
• Case study and tool support
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Business processes are performed to ensure that
  work progress towards accomplishment of goals.
• Information systems have been developed to
  support the management of processes and their
  coordination.
• The term Workflow is referring to the handling of
  businesses processes using information systems,
  and denominates the automation of a business
  process, in whole or part.

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Introduction

• Workflow Information Systems (WIS) cover the
  application of information technology to business
  problems.
• Its primary characteristic is the automation of
  processes involving combinations of human
  activities with information technology
  applications.
• Owing to the fact that the users of a IS interact
  with it through its user interfaces (UIs) in the
  pursuit of organizational goals, flexibility in
  creating them is therefore important.
• We will explore a systematic way to define UIs
  for a WIS.

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State of the art

• A number of approaches have been used to model
  business processes and workflows those include
• notations
• Petri Nets, Statecharts Diagrams, BPMN, UML
  Activity Diagrams
• software tools
• Progression Model, YAWL, Microsoft Windows
  Workflow Foundation, WebSphere MQ Workflow,
  WIDE, ARIS, among others
• workflow patterns
• Control flow patterns, workflow data patterns,
  workflow resource patterns

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State of the art

• Model-based user interface design is intended to
  assist in designing user interfaces (UIs) with a
  more formal computer supported methodology.
• There are solutions to developing UIs that are
  based in eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML).
• UsiXML is a XML compliant markup language
  capturing the essence of what a UI is or should
  be independently of physical characteristics.

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Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information
Systems

• We propose a framework that considers the
  principal components to model workflow.
• The intention is to use this model as a base to
  develop UIs.
• The underlying conceptual model is composed of
  process, task, and organization models.

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Conceptual Modeling of Workflow Information
Systems
A process model indicates the ordering of
processes in time, space, and resources.
An organizational model contains the elements
involved in an organization
A task model represents a decomposition of tasks
into sub-tasks linked with task relationships.
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How to Generate the User Interfaces
the Cameleon Reference Framework for
developing multi-target UIs, which is decomposed
in four steps
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How to Generate the User Interfaces
UsiXML has been selected as the UIDL.
It describes at a high level of abstraction the
constituting elements of the UI of an
application widgets, controls, containers,
modalities, interaction techniques, etc.
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How to Generate the User Interfaces
the stylistics in a graphical representation
relies on icons.
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Case study and tool support

• The case study analyzes how people organize the
  program of small conferences by using a review
  tool.

Tasks and jobs identification
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Case study and tool support
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Case study and tool support
Resource and organizational unit identification
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Case study and tool support
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Case study and tool support
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Assigning tasks to resources
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Case study and tool support
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Case study and tool support
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Case study and tool support
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Case study and tool support
User interface
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Case study and tool support
Agenda
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Case study and tool support
Work list
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Conclusion

• We have introduced a methodology for developing
  the various user interfaces of a workflow
  information system, which are advocated to
  automate business processes, following a
  model-centric approach based on the requirements
  and processes of the organization.
• A conceptual modeling approach integrates the
  following concept defined through a meta-model
  workflow, process, task, domain, job definition,
  organizational structure, and resources.
• These concepts along with their attributes have
  been integrated in UsiXML

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Conclusion

• From each task model, transformational rules
  were applied in order to
• generate the different UIs involved in the
  workflow.
• A workflow editor-manager tool has been
  developed to support the
• method enactment.
• A case study has been reported and summarized
  to demonstrate the
• feasibility of this approach.
• This method has been validated on several
  real-world case studies.
• As future work, usability guidelines will be
  applied in the generation of
• UIs, workflow analysis methods will be taken
  into account.

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Thank you very much for your attention
http//www.usixml.org User Interface eXtensible
Markup Language
http//www.similar.cc European network on
Multimodal UIs
For more information and downloading,http//www.i
sys.ucl.ac.be/bchi
Special thanks to all members of the team!