Category: Business Process Modeling

UML’s Semantic Master Key, Lost & Found

Preamble

When its first version was published twenty years ago the prognosis for OMG’s UML (Unified Modeling Language) was of rapid and wide expansion. It didn’t happen, and notwithstanding a noteworthy usage, UML has not become  “the” unified modeling language. Beyond the diverse agendas of methods and tools providers, this falling short may have something to do with a lack of robust semantics, as illustrated by UML 2.5’s halfhearted attempt to define individuals.

monk_3doigts
Actual & Digital Identities (Jonathan Monk)

UML 2.5 Aborted Attempt with Individual 

UML 2.5 has often been presented as an attempt to redress the wayward and increasingly convoluted paths taken by the previous versions. Yet, beside some useful (and long needed) clarifications and adjustments, its governing group failed to agree on some compact and unambiguous semantics and had to content itself with perfunctory guidelines introduced as an afterthought.

As a matter of fact the OMG committee may have tried to get its semantics in order, as suggested by the chapter “On semantics” making the point right away with a distinction between the things to be described and the categories to be applied:

“A UML model consists of three major categories of model elements [classifiers, events, and behaviors], each of which may be used to make statements about different kinds of individual things within the system being modeled (termed simply “individuals”in the following)”.

That straightforward understanding (UML is meant to describe individual objects, events, or behaviors) could have provided the semantic cornerstone of a sound approach. Surprisingly, and for obscure reasons, it is soon smudged by syntactical overlapping and semantic ambiguity, the term “individual” being used indifferently as adjective and noun, and then appears to be restricted to classifiers only. That leaves UML with a dearth of clear semantics regarding its scope.

Individual as a Semantic Master Key

The early dismiss of individual as a constitutive concept is unfortunate because, taking a leaf from Archimedes, it could have been the fulcrum on which to place the UML lever.

To begin with, no modeling language, especially one supposed to be unified, can do without some convincing semantics about what it is supposed to describe:

  • Analysis (aka extensional) models are descriptive as they deal with external individuals, things or behaviors, capturing their relevant aspects.
  • Design (aka prescriptive) models are prescriptive as they describe how to build software components and execute processes.
A rigorous identification mechanism must ensure a persistent and consistent mapping of individuals

As analysis and design models serve different purposes they clearly differ. Nonetheless, since UML is meant to straddles the divide between business and systems realms, some rigorous mechanism must ensure a persistent and consistent mapping of individuals.

That could have been neatly achieved with a comprehensive and unified interpretation of individuals, combined with a clear taxonomy of the aspects to be modeled:

  • Individuals are whatever occurrences (in business or systems contexts) with identities of their own.
  • These individuals (objects, events, or behaviors) can be specified with regard to their structure and relationships.

The logical primacy of this approach is reinforced by its immediate, practical, and conclusive benefits for business processes modeling on one side, model based engineering processes on the other side.

A Key to Business Processes Modeling

As far as business processes are concerned, modeling the part played by supporting systems turns around few critical issues, and these issues can be dealt more clearly and consistently when set in reference to individuals taxonomy (objects, behaviors, events) e.g:

  • Functional or non functional requirements ? The former can be associated with individuals, the latter cannot.
  • Architecture or application ? The former affect the specification of interactions between individuals, the latter affect only their local features.
  • Synchronous or asynchronous ? Specifications can only be made with regard to life-cycles and time-frames: system (objects), process (behaviors), or instant (event).
  • Structures or Relationships ? The former are bound to individuals’ identity, the latter are used between different individuals.
  • Inheritance or Delegation ? The former is used for the specification of structural or functional features, the latter for individuals’ behaviors.

More generally that understanding of individuals should greatly enhance the alignment of systems functional architectures with business processes.

A Key to Model Based Systems Engineering

As should be expected from a lack of semantic foundations, one of the main characteristics of the UML community is its fragmented practices, regrouped around diagrams (e.g Use case or Class) or task (e.g requirements analysis or code generation).

The challenge can be directly observed for model based system engineering and software development: with the exception of Statecharts for RT modeling, Class diagrams are the only ones used all along engineering processes; the others, when used, are reduced to documentation purposes. That bottleneck in development flows can be seen as the direct consequence of UML restricted semantics: since behaviors are not identified as individuals in their own right, their description cannot be directly translated into software artifacts, but have to be understood as part of active objects descriptions before being translated into class diagrams. Hence the apparent redundancy of corresponding diagrams.

As a corollary, reinstating a unified semantics of individual for both classifiers and behaviors could be the key to a seamless integration of the main UML diagrams. Most important, that would bear out the cross benefits of combining UML and MBSE.

A Key to Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture can be defined in terms of territories and maps, the former materialized by the realities of enterprise organization and business operations, the latter by the assortment of charts, blueprints, or models used to describe enterprise organization, business processes, IT systems, and software applications. Along that understanding the whole endeavor depends on the ability to manage the continuity and consistency of charting; and that cannot be done without a unified and persistent identification mechanism of objects and processes across business, enterprise, and systems.

Further Readings

Event Oriented Analysis & Object Oriented Design

As it’s safe to assume that a primary objective of process analysis is to align business concerns (by nature specific and changing) with enterprise architectures (meant to be shared and stable), events could provide a good starting point.

(F. Handoko)
Event, concerns, processing (F. Handoko)

Business Analysis & Application Design

Taking example from the convincing track record of object oriented approaches for systems architectures and software design, the same principles have been tried for business requirements analysis. While that approach can be credited with significant realizations, success usually depends on some prior alignment of business domains with their system counterpart, in particular on the possibility to uniformly and consistently identify and define business entities as objects independently of operating processes.

Alternatively, when business entities cannot not be readily identified upfront as system objects, analysis may start with organization, entitled agents, activities, and be carried out with the definition of business flows and associated entities.

So, and whatever the approach, the question is how to ensure that the applications under consideration are designed in accordance with architecture capabilities.

System Architecture & Software Design

Words are worth the difference they make: as long as systems were not much more than an assortment of software modules, architecture and design could be understood as one and the same. But nowadays a distinction may be overdue between, on one hand the design of software components run within a single system’s address space and time-frame and, on the other hand, architectures of systems set across different spaces and time-frames.

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Architecture vs Design: words are worth the difference they make

Object oriented solutions (e.g Domain Driven Design) are arguably the option of choice for the former, but services oriented approaches may be a better fit for the latter. Not by chance, events provide a sound conceptual hinge between the two approaches.

Event Oriented Analysis vs Object Oriented Design

Object oriented principles can be streamlined around three core topics: (a) information hiding and coupling between structures and methods; (b) inheritance between types; (c) communication through interfaces and polymorphism.

OO principles can be streamlined along three topics: encapsulation (a), inheritance (b), and communication through interfaces (c).
OO principles can be streamlined around three topics: encapsulation (a), inheritance (b), and communication through interfaces (c).

Of these, encapsulation and inheritance are specific to software design, but communication mechanisms are also at the core of services oriented architectures. Considering messages as the logical system counterparts of business events, event-oriented analysis should help to align business processes with systems capabilities.

From a business processes perspective, events are signaling changes in the states of activities, objects, or expectations. Given that  supporting systems are meant to deal with those changes, the analysis of business requirements could proceed from corresponding events:

  • Business events are defined with regard to time-frames (a) and sources to be authenticated and authorized (b).
  • Triggering changes must be described by messages with regard to their functional (c) and operational (d) scope.
  • Business logic (e) and entities (f) are often shared across applications and therefore better defined independently.
  • Internal changes (same space and time-frame) are hidden.
  • Triggered (external) changes are defined with regard to time-frames (h), processes (d), and devices (g).

A simplified blueprint of Event Oriented Process Analysis
A simplified blueprint of Event Oriented Process Analysis

As it happens, those facets can be aligned with OO design ones, with (c) and (d) for communication, (e) and (f) for encapsulation. On a broader perspective they also fit with the growing focus on event-driven applications and service oriented architectures.

From Event Oriented Process Analysis to Service Oriented Architectures

By moving business logic to the background, event-driven analysis fosters polymorphism at enterprise level with corresponding benefits:

  • With regard to business processes, events come with functional and operational requirements set independently of the business logic that will be carried out: trigger (what has changed), role (who is requesting), and message communication semantics (when the system is supposed to deal with the event).
  • With regard to system capabilities messages can be used to align business (aka external) events with system (aka internal) ones independently of the business entities and logic (what is to be done and how).
  • With regard to architecture and design, that approach is to uphold OO principles by dealing separately with polymorphic requests (interfaces) and business logic (methods).

Those benefits appear clearly when capabilities are realized by services defined with regard to business processes (customers), business objects (messages), business logic (contract), and business operations (policy).

Environment (bold) vs Services (italic)
Environment (bold) vs Services (italic)

It must be reminded that services are part of functional architectures and as a consequence cannot be directly addressed by users or devices.

Events & Action Semantics

With events set as modeling anchors, use cases may provide the modeling glue between processes and functional capabilities:

  • Triggering events (a) map changes in business environments (aka external events) to changes in systems objects (aka internal events).
  • Actors (b) map roles in organization to system users.
  • Messages (c) map the semantics of business processes to the semantics of applications (e) and domains (f).

Use cases (orange) provide a comprehensive and consistent mapping from processes (green) to services (blue).
Use cases (orange) provide a comprehensive and consistent mapping from processes (green) to services (blue).

On that basis, the main objective of event-oriented analysis would be to distinguish between communication and business semantics, the former dealing with interactions, the latter with business logic.

Further Reading

Conceptual Models & Abstraction Scales

Following the recent publication of a new standard for conceptual modeling of automation systems (Object-Process Methodology (ISO/PAS 19450:2015) it may be interesting to explore how it relates to abstraction and meta-models.

oskar-schlemmer-at-bahaus
Meta-models are drawn along lean abstraction scales (Oskar Schlemmer )

Models & Meta Models

Just like models are meant to describe sets of actual instances, meta-models are meant to do the same for sets of modeling artifacts independently of their targets. Along that reasoning, conceptual modeling of automation systems could be achieved either with a single language covering all aspects, or with a meta-language dealing with different sets of models, e.g MDA’s computation independent, platform independent, and platform specific models.

Modeling Languages covering technical, functional, and business concerns.
Two alternative options for the modeling of automation systems: unified language, or a meta language covering technical (e.g PSMs), functional (e.g PIMs), and business (e.g CIMs) scopes.

Given a model based engineering framework (e.g MDA), meta-models are generally used to support downstream models transformation targeting designs and code. But when upstream conceptual models are concerned, the challenge is to tackle the knowledge-to-systems transition. For that purpose some shared modeling roof is required for the definition of the symbolic footprint of the targeted business in the automation system under consideration.

Symbolic Footprint

Given that automation systems are meant to manage symbolic objects (aka surrogates), one should expect the distinction between actual instances and their symbolic representations to be the cornerstone of corresponding modeling languages. Along that reasoning, modeling of automation systems should start with the symbolic representation of actual business footprints, namely: the sets of objects, events, and processes, the roles played by agents (aka active objects), and the description of the associated states and rules. Containers would be added for the management of collections.

Automation systems modeling begins with the symbolic representation of actual instances
Automation systems modeling begins with the symbolic representation by systems of actual instances of business related objects and phenomena.

Next, as illustrated by the Object/Agent hierarchy, business worlds are not flat but built from sundry structures and facets to be represented by multiple levels of descriptions. That’s where abstractions are to be introduced.

Abstraction & Variants

The purpose of abstractions is to manage variants, and as such they can be used in two ways:

  • For partial descriptions of actual instances depending on targeted features. That can be achieved using composition (for structural variants) and partitions (for functional ones).
  • As hierarchies of symbolic descriptions (aka types and sub-types) subsuming variants identified at instances level.

On that basis the challenge is to find the level of detail (targeted actual instances) and abstraction (symbolic footprint) that will best describe supporting systems functionalities. Such level will have to meet two conditions:

  1. A minimal number of comprehensive and exclusive categories covering the structural variants of the sets of instances to be uniformly, consistently, and continuously identified by both enterprise and supporting systems.
  2. A consistent but adjustable set of types and sub-types anchored to the core structural categories and covering the functional variants .

Climbing up and down abstraction ladders looking for right levels is arguably the critical part of conceptual modeling, but the search will greatly benefit from the distinction between models and meta-models. Assuming meta-models are meant to ignore domain specific features altogether, they introduce a qualitative gap on abstraction scales as the respective hierarchies of models and meta-models are targeting different kind of instances. The modeling of agents and roles epitomizes the benefits of that distinction.

Abstraction & Meta Models

Taking customers for example, a naive approach would use Customer as a modeling type inheriting from a super-type, e.g Party. But then, if parties are to be uniformly identified (#), that would preclude any agent for playing multiple roles, e.g customer and supplier.

A separate description of parties and roles would clearly be a better option as it would unify the identification of the former without introducing unwarranted constraints on the latter which would then be defined and identified as the realization of a relationship played by a party.

Not surprisingly, that distinction would also be congruent with the one between models and meta-model:

  • Meta-models will describe generic aspects independently of domain-specific considerations, in particular organizational context (units and roles) and interactions with systems (a).
  • Models will define Staff, Supplier and Customer according to the semantics of the business considered (b).

Composition, partitions and specialization can be used to detail the symbolic footprint
Composition, partitions and specialization can be used along two different abstraction scales.

That distinction between abstraction scales can also be applied to the conceptual modeling of automation systems.

Abstraction Scales & Conceptual Models

To begin with definitions, conceptual representations could be used for all mental constructs, whereas symbolic representations would be used only for the subset earmarked for communication purposes. That would mean that, contrary to conceptual representations that can be detached of business and enterprise practicalities, symbolic representations are necessarily built on design, and should be assessed accordingly. In our case the aim of such representations would be to describe the exchanges between business processes and supporting systems.

That understanding neatly fits the conceptual modeling of automation systems whose purpose would be to consolidate generic and business specific abstraction scales, the former for symbolic representations of the exchanges between business and systems, the latter symbolic representation of business contents.

At this point it must be noted that the scales are not necessarily aligned in continuity (with meta-models’ being higher and models’ being lower) as their respective ontologies may overlap (Organizational Entity and Party) or cross (Function and Role).

Toward an Ontological Framework for Enterprise Architectures Modeling

Along an analytic perspective, ontologies are meant to determine the categories that can comprehensively and consistently denote the instances of a domain under consideration; applied to enterprise concerns that would entail:

  • Thesaurus: for the whole range of terms and concepts.
  • Documents: for documents with regard to topics.
  • Business: for enterprise organization and business objects and activities.
  • Engineering: for systems surrogates associated to enterprise organization and business objects and activities

Ontologies provide a common conceptual framework for  models and meta-models

That would open the door to a seamless integration of business intelligence, systems engineering, knowledge management, and decision-making.

Further Reading

External Links

Agile Collaboration & Enterprise Creativity

Open-plan offices and social networks are often seen as significant factors of collaboration and innovation, breeding and nurturing the creativity of knowledge workers, weaving their ideas into webs of truths, and molding their minds into some collective intelligence.


Trust & Communication (Juan Munoz)

Yet, as creativity comes with agility, knowledge workflows should give brains enough breathing space lest they get more pressure than pasture.

Collaboration & Thinking Flows

Collaboration is a means to an end. To be of any use exchanges have to be fed with renewed ideas and assumptions, triggering arguments and adjustments, and opening new perspectives. If not they may burn themselves out with hollow considerations blurring clues and expectations, clogging the channels, and finally stemming the thinking flows.

Taking example from lean manufacturing, the first objective should be to streamline knowledge workflows as to eliminate swirling pools of squabbles, drain stagnant puddles of stale thoughts, and gear collaboration to flowing knowledge streams. As illustrated by flood irrigation, the first step is to identify basin levels.

Dunbar Numbers & Collaboration Basins

Studying the grooming habits of social primates, psychologist Robin Dunbar came to the conclusion that the size of social circles that individuals of a living species can maintain is set by the size of brain’s neocortex. Further studies have confirmed Dunbar’s findings, with the corresponding sizes for humans set around 10 for trusted personal groups and 150 for untried social ones. As it happens, and not by chance, those numbers seem to coincide with actual observations: the former for personal and direct collaboration, the latter for social and mediated collaboration.

Based on that understanding, the objective would be to organize knowledge workflows across two primary basins:

  • On-site and face-to-face collaboration with trusted co-workers. Corresponding interactions would be driven by personal dispositions and attitudes.
  • On-line and networked collaboration with workers, trusted or otherwise. Corresponding interactions would be based on shared interests and past exchanges.

Knowledge Workflows

The aim of knowledge workflows is to process data into information and put it to use. That is to be achieved by combining different kinds of tasks, in particular:

  • Data and information management: build the symbolic descriptions of contexts, concerns, and means.
  • Objectives management: based on a set of symbolic descriptions, identify and refine opportunities together with the ways to realize them.
  • Tasks management: allocate rights and responsibilities across organizations and collaboration frames, public and shallow or personal and deep.
  • Flows management: monitor and manage actual flows, publish arguments and propositions, consolidate decisions, …

Taking into account constraints and dependencies between the tasks, the aims would be to balance creativity and automation while eliminating superfluous intermediate products (like documents or models) or activities (e.g unfocused meetings).

With regard to dependencies, KM tasks are often intertwined and cannot be carried out sequentially; moreover, as illustrated by the impact of “creative accounting” on accounted activities, their overlapping is not frozen but subject to feedback, changes and adjustments.

With regard to automation, three groups are to be considered: the first requires only raw processing power and can be fully automated; the second also involves some intelligence that may be provided by smart systems; and the third calls for decision-making that can only be done by human agents entitled by the organization.

At first sight some lessons could be drawn from lean manufacturing, yet, since knowledge processes are not subject to hardware constraints, agile approaches should provide a more informative reference.

Iterative Knowledge Processing

A simple preliminary step is to check the applicability of agile principles by replacing “software” by “knowledge”. Assuming that ground is secured, the core undertaking is to consider what would become of cycles and iterations when applied to knowledge processing:

  • Cycle invariants: tasks would be iterated on given sets of symbolic descriptions applied to the state of affairs (contexts, concerns, and means).
  • Iterations content: based on those descriptions data would be processed into information, changes would be monitored, and possibilities explored.
  • Exit condition: cycles would complete with decisions committing changes in the state of affairs that would also entail adjustments or changes in symbolic descriptions.

That scheme meets three of the basic tenets of the agile paradigm, i.e open scope (unknowns cannot be set in advance), continuity of delivery (invariants are defined and managed by knowledge workers), and users in driving seats (through exit conditions). Yet it still doesn’t deal with creativity and the benefits of collaboration for knowledge workers.

Thinking Space & Pace

The scope of creativity in processes is neatly circumscribed by the nature of flows, i.e the possibility to insert knowledge during the processing: external for material flows (e.g in manufacturing), internal for symbolic flows (e.g in software engineering and knowledge processing).

Yet, whereas both software engineering and knowledge processes come with some built-in capability to redefined their symbolic flows on-the-fly, they don’t grant the same room to creativity. Contrary to software engineering projects which have to close their perspectives on the delivery of working products, knowledge processes are meant to keep them open to new understandings and opportunities. For the former creativity is the means to an end, for the latter it’s the end in itself, with collaboration as means.

Such opposite perspectives have direct consequences for two basic agile collaboration mechanisms: backlog and time-boxing:

  • Backlogs are used to structure and manage the space under exploration. But contrary to software processes whose space is focused and structured by users’ needs, knowledge processes are supposed to play on workers’ creativity to expand and redefine the range under consideration.
  • Time-boxes are used to synchronize tasks. But with creativity entering the fray, neither space granularity or thinking pace can be set in advance and coerced into single-sized boxes. In that case individuals must remain in full control of the contents and stride of their thinking streams.

It ensues that when creativity is the primary success factor standard agile collaboration mechanisms are falling short and intelligent collaboration schemes are to be introduced.

Creativity & Collaboration Tiers

The synchronization of creative activities has to deal with conflicting objectives:

  • On one hand the mental maps of knowledge workers and the stream of their thoughts have to be dynamically aligned.
  • On the other hand unsolicited face-to-face interactions or instant communications may significantly impair the course of creative thinking.

When activities, e.g software engineering, can be streamlined towards the delivery of clearly defined outcomes, backlogs and time-boxes can be used to harness workers’ creativity. When that’s not the case more sophisticated collaboration mechanisms are needed.

Assuming that mediated collaboration has a limited impact on thinking creativity (emails don’t have to be answered, or even presented, instantly), the objective is to steer knowledge workflows across a two-tiered collaboration framework: one personal and direct between knowledge workers, the other social and mediated through enterprise or institutional networks.

On the first tier knowledge workers would manage their thinking flows (content and tempo) independently, initiating or accepting personal collaboration (either through physical contact or some kind of instant messaging) depending on their respective “state of mind”.

The second tier would be for social collaboration and would be expected to replace backlogs and time-boxing. Proceeding from the first to the second tier would be conditioned by workers’ needs and expectations, triggered on their own initiative or following prompts.

From Personal to Collective Thinking

The challenging issue is obviously to define and implement the mechanisms governing the exchanges between collaboration tiers, e.g:

  • How to keep tabs on topics and contents to be safeguarded.
  • How to mediate (i.e filter and time) the solicitations and contribution issued by the social tier.
  • How to assess the solicitations and contribution issued by individuals.
  • How to assess and manage knowledge deemed to remain proprietary.
  • How to identify and manage knowledge workers personal and social circles.

Whereas such issues are customary tackled by various AI systems (knowledge management, decision-making, multi-players games, etc), taken as a whole they bring up the question of the relationship between personal and collective thinking, and as a corollary, the role of organization in nurturing corporate innovation.

Conclusion: Collaboration Spaces vs Panopticon

As illustrated by the rising of futuristic headquarters, leading technology firms have been trying to tackle these issues by redefining internal architecture as collaboration spaces. Compared to traditional open spaces, such approaches try to fuse physical and digital spaces into overlapping layers of collaboration spaces, using artificial intelligence to harness cooperation.

Yet, lest uniform and comprehensive transparency brings the worrying shadow of a panopticon within which everyone can be unknowingly observed, working spaces have to be designed as to enhance collaboration without trespassing on privacy.

That could be achieved with a layered transparency set along the nature of collaboration:

  • Immediate and personal: working cells regrouping 5 to 10 workstations earmarked for a task and used indifferently by teams members.
  • Delayed and personal: open physical spaces accommodating working cells, with instant messaging and geo-localization; spaces are hinged on domains and focused on shared knowledge.
  • On-line and networked: digital spaces merging physical spaces and organizational structures.

That mix of physical and virtual spaces could be dynamically redefined depending on activities, projects, location, and organisation.

Further Readings

External Links

Relating to Functions

Preamble

Functions map inputs with outputs as expected from a performing agent whatever its nature (concrete or abstract) or means (physical, logical, or magical).
They are not to be confused with objectives (which don’t necessarily specify performing agents or detail inputs) nor with activities (which purport to describe concrete execution paths).

simon-fujiwara-empire-clock
Functions and Processes are set along orthogonal dimensions (Simon Fujiwara)

Those distinctions are critical when the aim is to align business processes requirements with systems architecture capabilities.

Functions & Processes

Functions are complete (contrary to objectives) and abstract (contrary to activities) descriptions of what organizations (represented by actors), system architectures (represented by services), or objects (through operations) can do. As such they are akin to interfaces or types, and cannot be instanciated on their own. Processes on the contrary describe how activities are executed, i.e instanciated (#).

Business processes describe sets of execution instances (#). Functions describe what can be expected from enterprise or functional architectures. Business logic describe how the flows are to be processed.
Business processes describe sets of execution instances (#). Functions describe what can be expected from enterprise or functional architectures. Business logic describe how the flows are to be processed.

That understanding provides for a modular approach to business processes:

  • Business processes can be defined with regard to business functions independently of the way they are supported.
  • Business rules can be managed independently of the way they are applied, by people or systems.
  • Business logic can be factored out in functions (business or systems) or set within specific processes.

Yet that would not be possible without some modeling across enterprise architecture layers.

Functions & Models

Functions are meant to facilitate reuse across enterprise architectures, which entails descriptions that are clearly and easily accessible: context, modus operandi, expected outcome. Whatever the modeling method(s) in use, it’s safe to assume that different stakeholders across enterprise architectures will pursue different objectives, to be defined with different concepts. If they are to communicate they will need some explicit and unambiguous semantics for the links between processes, functions, and activities:

  • Functional flows are used between processes and functions (a) or actors (d), or between actors and functions (e).
  • Composition or aggregates are used to specify where the business logic is to be employed, by functions (b) or by processes (c).
  • Documentation references (f) are used between unspecified actors and business logic, in case it would performed by people.

Semantics of connectors: functional flows (a,d,e), aggregates (b) and composition (c), and documentation (f).
Semantics of connectors: functional flows (a,d,e), aggregates (b) and composition (c), and documentation (f).

Finally, the semantics of connectors used between functions will have to be consistent with the one used to connect them to processes and activities.

Combining Functions

Considering that functions are neatly set within the systems modeling realm, one would assume that inheritance and structure connectors can be used to detail and combine them. Yet, since functions cannot be instantiated, some paring down can be applied to their semantics:

  • Traditional structure connectors are set with regard to identification: bound to structure for composition, set independently otherwise. Since functions have no instances that criterion is irrelevant and the same reasoning goes for composition.
  • Likewise, since functions have no states to be considered, inheritance of functions can be represented by aggregates.

ddd
Functions can be combined at will using only aggregates

As far as functions are concerned, structures as well as inheritance connectors can be fully and soundly replaced by aggregate ones, which could significantly improve the mapping of business processes, activities, and supporting functions.

Further Readings

Enterprise Systems & the OS Kernel Paradigm

Preamble

Given the ubiquity of information and communication technologies on one hand, the falling apart of technical fences between systems, enterprises, and business environments on the other hand, applying the operating system (OS) paradigm to enterprise architectures seems a logical move.

Users and access to services (Queuing at a Post Office in French West Indies)

Borrowing the blueprint of computers operating systems, enterprise operating systems (EOS) would  be organized around a kernel managing shared resources (people, hardware and software) and providing services to business, engineering or operational processes.

Gerrymandering & Layers

When IT was neatly fenced behind computer screens managers could keep a clear view on organization, roles, and responsibilities. But with physical hedges replaced by clouded walls, the risk is that IT may appear as the primary constituent of enterprise architecture. Given the lack of formal arguments against what may be a misguided understanding, enterprise architects have to rely on pragmatic answers. Yet, they could prop their arguments by upending the very principles of IT operating systems and restore the right governance footprint.

To begin with, turfs must be reclaimed, and that can be done if the whole of assets and services are layered according to the nature of problems and solutions: business processes (enterprise), supporting functionalities (systems), and technologies (platforms).

Problems and solutions must be set along architecture layers
EA must separate and federate concerns along architecture layers

Then, reclaiming must also include governance, and for that purpose EOS are to rely on a comprehensive and consistent understanding of assets, people and mechanisms across layers:

  • Physical assets, including hardware.
  • Non physical assets, including software.
  • Agents (identified people with organizational responsibilities) and roles.
  • Events (changes in the state of objects, processes, or expectations) and activities.

Mimicking traditional OS, that could be achieved with a small and compact conceptual kernel of formal concepts bearing out the definitions of primitives and services for the whole of enterprise processes.

EOS’s Kernel: 12 concepts

A wealth of definitions may be the main barrier to enterprise architecture as a discipline because such profusion necessarily comes with overlaps, ambiguities, and inconsistencies. Hence the benefit of relying on a small set of concepts covering the whole of enterprise systems:

  • Six for individuals actual (objects, events, processes) and symbolic (surrogates objects, activities, roles) elements.
  • One for actual (locations) or symbolic (package) containers.
  • One for the partitioning of behaviors (branch) or surrogates (power type).
  • Four for actual (channels and synchronization) and symbolic (references and flows) connectors.

Semantics
Governance calls for comprehensive and consistent semantics

Considering that nowadays business entities (enterprise), services (systems), and software components (technology) share the same distributed world, these concepts have to keep some semantic consistency across layers whatever their lexical avatars. To mention two critical examples, actors (aka roles) and events must be consistently understood by business and system analysts.

Those concepts are used to describe enterprise systems building blocks which can be combined with a small set of well known syntactic operators:

  • Two types of connectors depending on target: instances (associations) or types (inheritance).
  • Three types connections for nondescript, aggregation, and composition.

UMLSharp_syntax
Syntactic operators are meant to be applied independently of targets semantics

Again, Occam’s razor should be the rule: just like semantics are consistently defined across architecture layers, the same syntactic operators are to be uniformly applied to artifacts independently of their semantics.

Kernel’s Functions

Continuing with the kernel analogy, based on a comprehensive and consistent description of resources, the traditional OS functions can be reinterpreted with regard to architecture capabilities implemented across layers:

  • What: memory of business objects and operations (enterprise), data base logical entities (systems), data base physical records (platforms).
  • Who: roles (enterprise), logical interfaces (systems), and physical entry points (platforms).
  • When: business events and processes (enterprise), transaction management (systems), and middleware (platforms).
  • Where: sites (enterprise), logical processing units (systems), network architecture (platforms).
  • How: business processes (enterprise), applications (systems), and programs (platforms).

Traceability of Capabilities across architecture layers

That fits with the raison d’être of a kernel which is to combine core functions in order to support the services called by processes.

Services

Still milking the OS analogy, a primary goal of an enterprise kernel is to support a seamless integration of services:

  1. Business driven: the definition of services must be directly and unambiguously associated to business ends and means across enterprise layers.
  2. Traceability: they must ensure the transparency of the tie-ups between organization and processes on one hand, information systems on the other hand.
  3. Plasticity: they must facilitate the alignment of changes in business objectives, organization and supporting systems.

A reasoned way to achieve these objectives is to classify services with regard to the purpose of calling processes:

  • Business processes deal with the transactions between the enterprise and its environment.
  • Engineering processes deal with the development of enterprise resources independently of their use.
  • Operational processes deal with the management of enterprise resources when directly or indirectly used by business processes.

Enterprise Operating System: Layers & Services
Enterprise Operating System: Layers & Services

That classification can then be crossed with architecture levels:

  • At enterprise level services are bound to assets to be used by business, engineering, or operational processes.
  • At systems level services are bound to functions supporting business, engineering, or operational processes.
  • At platform level services are bound to resources used by business, engineering, or operational processes.

As services will usually rely on different functions across layers, the complexity will be dealt with by kernel primitives and masked behind interfaces.

Services called by processes can combine different functions directly (basic lines) or across layers (dashed lines).

Finally, that organization of services along architecture layers may be aligned with governance levels: strategic for enterprise assets, tactical for systems functionalities, and operational for platforms and resources.

Further Reading

Use Cases & Action Semantics

Synopsis

Use cases are meant to describe dialogues between users and systems, yet they usually don’t stand in isolation. On one hand they stem from business processes, on the other hand they must be realized by system functionalities, some already supported, others to be newly developed. As bringing the three facets within a shared modeling paradigm may seem a long shot, some practical options may be at hand.

jonamonk_mouton
Use cases should leave no room for interpretations (Jonathan Monk)

To begin with, a typical option would be to use the OMG’s Meta-Object Facility (MOF) to translate the relevant subset of BPM models into UML ones. But then if, as previously suggested, use cases can be matched with such a subset, a more limited and pragmatic approach would be to introduce some modeling primitives targeting UML artifacts.

From BPM to UML: Meta-model vs Use cases.
From BPM to UML: Meta-model vs Use cases.

For that purpose it will be necessary to clarify the action semantics associated with the communication between processes and systems.

Meta-models drawbacks

Contrary to models, which deal with instances of business objects and activities, meta-models are supposedly blind to business contents as they are meant to describe modeling artifacts independently of what they stand for in business contexts. To take an example, Customer is a modeling type, UML Actor is a meta-modeling one.

To stress the point, meta-languages have nothing to say about the semantics of targeted domains: they only know the language constructs used to describe domains contents and the mapping rules between those constructs.

As a consequence, whereas meta-languages are at their best when applied to clear and compact modeling languages, they scale poorly because of the exponential complexity of rules and the need to deal with all and every language idiosyncrasies. Moreover, performances degrade critically with ambiguities because even limited semantics uncertainties often pollute the meaning of trustworthy neighbors generating cascades of doubtful translations (see Knowledge-based model transformation).

ccc
Factoring a core with trustworthy semantics (b) will prevent questionable ones from tainting the whole translation (a).

Yet, scalability and ambiguity problems can be overcame by applying a core of unambiguous modeling constructs to a specific subset, and that can be achieved with use cases.

Use Cases & UML diagrams

As it happened, the Use Case can be seen as the native UML construct, the original backbone around which preexisting modeling artifacts have been consolidated, becoming a central and versatile hub of UML-based development processes:

  • Sequence diagrams describe collaborations between system components but can also describe interactions between actors and systems (i.e use cases).
  • Activity diagrams describe the business logic to be applied by use cases.
  • Class diagrams can be used for the design of software components but also for the analysis of business objects referenced by use cases.
  • State diagrams can be used for the behavior of software components but also for the states of business objects or processes along execution paths of use cases.
Use cases at the hub of UML diagrams
Use case as Root Sequence

Apart of being a cornerstone of UML modeling, use cases are also its doorway as they can be represented by a simple sequence diagram describing interactions between users and systems, i.e between business processes and applications. So the next step should be to boil down the semantics of those interactions.

Use Cases & Action Semantics

When use cases are understood as gateways between business users and supporting systems, it should be possible to characterize the basic action semantics of messages in terms of expectations with regard to changes and activity:

  • Change: what process expects from system with regard to the representation of business context.
  • Activity: what process expects from system with regard to its supporting role.
Basic action semantics for interactions between users (BPM) and systems (UML)
Basic action semantics for interactions between users (BPM) and systems (UML)

Crossing the two criteria gives four basic situations for users-to-system action semantics:

  • Reading: no relevant change in the environment has to be registered, and no activity has to be supported.
  • Monitoring: no relevant change in the environment has to be registered, but the system is supposed to keep track on some activity.
  • Achievement: the system is supposed to keep track on some specific change in the environment without carrying out any specific activity.
  • Accomplishment: the system is supposed to keep track on some specific change in the environment and support associated activity.

These action primitives have to be wrapped into interaction ones relating to changing expectations of users and systems.

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State machine can fully support action semantics

When use cases are positioned at the center of UML diagrams, those situations can be neatly modeled with state machines for actors’ expectations, business objects, and execution.

BPM_UML_UC
UC specified with State machine.

Use Cases & Modeling Patterns

If use cases describe what business processes expect from supporting systems, they can be used to map action semantics to UML diagrams:

  • Reading: class diagrams with relevant queries.
  • Monitoring: activity diagrams with reference to class diagrams.
  • Achievement:  class diagrams with associated state diagrams.
  • Accomplishment:  activity diagrams with associated state diagrams and reference to class diagrams.
From use cases action semantics to UML diagrams
From use cases action semantics to UML diagrams

While that catalog cannot pretend to fully support requirements, the part it does support comes with two critical benefits:

  1. It fully and consistently describes the interactions at architecture level.
  2. It can be unambiguously translated from BPM to UML.

On that basis, use cases provide a compact and unambiguous kernel of modeling constructs bridging the gap between BPM and UML.

Further Reading

Feasibility & Capabilities

Synopsis

As far as systems engineering is concerned, the aim of a feasibility study is to verify that a business solution can be supported by a system architecture (requirements feasibility) subject to some agreed technical and budgetary constraints (engineering feasibility).

Feasibility is about requirements, capabilities with supporting systems (Urs Fisher)

Where to Begin

A feasibility study is based on the implicit assumption of slack architecture capabilities. But since capabilities are set with regard to several dimensions, architectures boundaries cannot be taken for granted and decisions may even entail some arbitrage between business requirements and engineering constraints.

Using the well-known distinction between roles (who), activities (how), locations (where), control (when), and contents (what), feasibility should be considered for supporting functionalities (between business processes and systems) and implementation (between functionalities and platforms):

Feasibility with regard to Systems and Platforms

Depending on priorities, feasibility considerations could look from three perspectives:

  • Focusing on system functionalities (e.g with use cases) implies that system boundaries are already identified and that the business logic will be defined along with users’ interfaces.
  • Starting with business requirements puts business domains and logic on the driving seat, making room for variations in system functionalities and boundaries .
  • Operational requirements (physical environments, events, and processes execution) put the emphasis on a mix of business processes and quality of service, thus making software functionalities a dependent variable.

In any case a distinction should be made between requirements and engineering feasibility, the former set with regard to architecture capabilities, the latter with regard to development resources and budget constraints.

Requirements Feasibility & Architecture Capabilities

Functional capabilities are defined at system boundaries and if all feasibility options are to be properly explored, architectures capabilities must be understood as a trade-off between the five intrinsic factors e.g:

  • Security (entry points) and confidentiality (domains).
  • Compliance with regulatory constraints (domains) and flexibility (activities).
  • Reliability (processes) and interoperability (locations).
Feasible options must be set against capabilities

Feasible options could then be figured out by points set within the capabilities pentagon. Given metrics on functional requirements, their feasibility under the non functional constraints could be assessed with regard to cross capabilities. And since the same five core capabilities can be consistently defined across enterprise, systems, and platforms layers, requirements feasibility could be assessed without prejudging architecture decisions.

Business Requirements & Architecture Capabilities

One step further, the feasibility of business and operational objectives (the “Why” of the Zachman framework) can be more easily assessed if set on the outer range and mapped to architecture capabilities.

Business Requirements and Architecture Capabilities

Engineering Feasibility & ROI

Finally, the feasibility of business and functional requirements under the constraints set by non functional requirements has to be translated in terms of ROI, and for that purpose the business value has to be compared to the cost of engineering the solution given the resources (people and tools), technical requirements, and budgetary constraints.

Architecture Capabilities for Processes, with deontic (basic) and alethic (dashed) dependencies.
ROI assessment mapping business value against functionalities, engineering outlays, and operational costs.

That where the transparency and traceability of capabilities across layers may be especially useful when alternatives and priorities are to be considered mixing functionalities, engineering outlays, and operational costs.

Further Reading

Business Processes & Use Cases

Summary

As can be understood from their theoretical basis (Pi-Calculus, Petri Nets, or State Machines), processes are meant to describe the concurrent execution of activities. Assuming that large enterprises have to keep a level of indirection between operations and business logic, it ensues that activities and business logic should be defined independently of the way they are executed by business processes.

Communication Semantics vs Contexts & Contents (G. Winogrand)

For that purpose two basic modeling approaches are available:  BPM (Business Process Modeling) takes the business perspective, UML (Unified Modeling Language) takes the engineering one. Yet, each falls short with regard to a pivotal conceptual distinctions: BPM lumps together process execution and business logic, and UML makes no difference between business and software process execution. One way out of the difficulty would be to single out communications between agents (humans or systems), and specify interactions independently of their contents and channels.

vvv
Business Process: Communication + Business Logic

That could be achieved if communication semantics were defined independently of domain-specific languages (for information contents) and technical architecture (for communication channels). As it happens, and not by chance, the outcome would neatly coincide with use cases.

Linguistics & Computers Parlance

Business and functional requirements (see Requirements taxonomy) can be expressed with formal or natural languages. Requirements expressed with formal languages, domain-specific or generic, can be directly translated into some executable specifications. But when natural languages are used to describe what business expects from systems, requirements often require some elicitation.

When that challenge is put into a linguistic perspective, two school of thought can be considered, computational or functional.

The former approach is epitomized by Chomsky’s Generative Grammar and its claim that all languages, natural or otherwise, share an innate universal grammar (UG) supporting syntactic processing independently of their meanings. Nowadays, and notwithstanding its initial favor, that “computer friendly” paradigm hasn’t kept much track in general linguistics.

Alternatively, the functionalist school of thought considers linguistics as a general cognitive capability deprived of any autonomy. Along that reasoning there is no way to separate domain-specific semantics from linguistic constructs, which means that requirements complexities, linguistic or business specific, have to be dealt with as a lump, with or without the help of knowledgeable machines.

In between, a third approach has emerged that considers language as a functional system uniquely dedicated to communication and the mapping of meanings to symbolic representations. On that basis it should be possible to separate the communication apparatus (functional semantics) from the complexities of business (knowledge representation).

Processes Execution & Action Languages

Assuming the primary objective of business processes is to manage the concurrent execution of activities, their modeling should be driven by events and their consequences for interactions between business and systems. Unfortunately, that approach is not explicitly supported by BPM or UML.

Contrary to the “simplex” mapping of business information into corresponding data models (e.g using Relational Theory), models of business and systems processes (e.g Petri Nets or State Machines) have to be set in a “duplex” configuration as they are meant to operate simultaneously. Neither BPM nor UML are well equipped to deal with the task:

  • The BPM perspective is governed by business logic independently of interactions with systems.
  • Executable UML approaches are centered on software processes execution, and their extensions to action semantics deal essentially on class instances, features value, and objects states.

Such shortcomings are of no serious consequences for stand-alone applications, i.e when what happens at architecture level can be ignored; but overlooking the distinction between the respective semantics of business and software processes execution may critically hamper the usefulness, and even the validity, of models pertaining to represent distributed interactions between users and systems. Communication semantics may help to deal with the difficulty by providing relevant stereotypes and patterns.

Business Process Models

While business process models can (and should) also be used to feed software engineering processes, their primary purpose is to define how concurrent business operations are to be executed. As far as systems engineering is concerned, that will tally with three basic steps:

  1. Dock process interactions (aka sessions) to their business context: references to agents, business objects and time-frames.
  2. Specify interactions: references to context, roles, events, messages, and time related constraints.
  3. Specify information: structures, features, and rules.

Communication with systems: dock to context (1), interactions (2), information (3).
Communication with systems: dock to context (1), interactions (2), information (3).

Although modeling languages and tools usually support those tasks, the distinctions remain implicit, leaving users with the choice of semantics. In the absence of explicit guidelines confusion may ensue, e.g between business rules and their use by applications (BPM), or between business and system events (UML). Hence the benefits of introducing functional primitives dedicated to the description of interactions.

Such functional semantics can be illustrated by the well known CRUD primitives for the creation, reading, updating and deletion of objects, a similar approach being also applied to the design of domain specific patterns or primitives supported by functional frameworks. While thick on the ground, most of the corresponding communication frameworks deal with specific domains or technical protocols without factoring out what pertains to communication semantics independently of information contents or technical channels.

Communication semantics should be independent of business specific contents and systems architectures.
Communication semantics should be independent of business specific contents and systems architectures.

But that distinction could be especially productive when applied to business processes as it would be possible to fully separate the semantics of communications between agents and supporting systems on one hand, and the business logic used to process business flows on the other hand.

 Communication vs Action Semantics

Languages have developed to serve two different purposes: first as a means to communicate (a capability shared between humans and many primates), and then as a means to represent and process information (a capability specific to humans). Taking a leaf from functional approaches to linguistics, it may be possible to characterize messages with regard to action semantics, more precisely associated activity and attendant changes:

  • No change: messages relating to passive (objects) or active  (performed activity) states.
  • Change: messages relating to achievement (no activity) or accomplishment (attendant on performed activity).

Basic action semantics for interactions between users (BPM) and systems (UML)

Communication semantics can then be fully rounded off by adding changes in agents’ expectations to the ones in the states of objects and activities, all neatly modeled with state machines.

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Communication semantics: changes in expectations, objects, and activities.

It must also be noted that factoring out the modeling of agents’ expectations with regard to communications is in line with the principles of service oriented architectures (SOA).

Additionally, transitions would have to be characterized by:

  • Time-frame: single or different.
  • Address space : single or different.
  • Mode: information, request for information, or request for action.

Organizing business processes along those principles, would enable the alignment of BPMs with their UML counterpart.

Use Cases as Bridges between BPM & UML

Use cases can be seen as the default entry point for UML modeling, and as such they should provide a bridge from business process models. That can be achieved by if use cases are understood as a combination of interactions and activities, the former obtained from communications as defined above, the latter from business logic.

Use Cases are best understood as a combination of interactions and business logic
Use Cases are best understood as a combination of interactions and business logic

One step further, the distinction between communication semantics and business contents could be used to align models respectively to systems and software architectures:

Last but not least, the consolidation of models contents at architecture level would be congruent with modeling languages, BPM and UML.

Further Reading

External Links

How to Mind a Tree Story

Summary

Depending on devotees or dissenters, the Agile development model is all too often presented as dead-end or end-of-story. Some of that unfortunate situation can be explained, and hopefully pacified, by comparing users’ stories to plants, with their roots, trunks, and branches. Assuming that agility calls for sound footings and good springboards, it may be argued that many problems arise with stories barking at the wrong tree (application level) or getting lost in the woods (architecture level).

How to Mind/Mend a True/Tree Story
How to Mind/Mend a True/Tree Story

Application level: Trees, Bushes and Hedges

As Aristotle first stated, good stories have to follow the three unities: one course of action, located in a single space, run along continuous time.

That rule is clearly satisfied  by stories that can be developed like plants growing from clearly identified roots.

Yet, stories like bushes may grow too many offshoots to be accounted for by a single action narrative; in that case it may be possible to single out a primary trunk and a set of forking branches along which different scenarii could be developed.

More serious difficulties may appear with thickets mixing offshoots from different bushes sharing the same space. That situation will first require some ground work in order to single out individual roots, and then use them to extricate each bush separately. When, like offshoots that actually mingle, story-lines cross and share actions, the description of such actions (aka features) is to be factored out and separated from the contexts of their enactment in the different story-lines.

Finally, like bushes in hedges, stories may chronicle repeated activities serving some collective purpose. That configuration is both easy to recognize and dealt with effectively by introducing a stereotyped story feature for collections and loops management.

Architecture level: Groves, Woods and Plantations

Contrary to hedges which are built on the similarity of their constituents, groves are based on their functional differences, and that can also be seen as a critical distinction between containers and architectures.

In agile parlance, that is best compared to the difference between stories and epics, the former telling what happens between users and applications, the latter taking a bird’s view of the relationships between business processes and systems.

In most of the cases the question will arise for sizable stories deemed too large for development purposes. When dealing with that situation the first step should be to look for thickets and bushes, respectively to be set apart as individual bushes or refined as scenarii. When still confronted with multiple roots, the question would be to decide between hedges and groves, that is between repeated activities and collaboration. And that decision would be critical because collaborations call for a different kind of story (aka epics or themes) set at a higher level, namely architecture.

Scaling Ups and Downs

Assuming the three-units rule cannot be met, two alternative approaches are possible, depending on whether the story has to be broken down or upgraded to an epic, and the undoing of the rule can be used to make a decision:

  1. When the course of actions, once started, is to be contingent on subsequent business (aka external) events the story should be upgraded to an epic, as it will often refer to a part or whole of a business process.
  2. Otherwise: when activities are set along different periods of time (i.e contingent on time-events) the story can be broken down depending on size, functional architecture, or development constraints.
  3. Otherwise: when activities are distributed across locations it may be necessary to factor out architecture-dependent features dealing with shared address spaces and synchronization mechanisms

Applying those guidelines to stories will put the whole development processes on rails and help to align requirements with their architectural footprint: business logic, system functionalities, or platform technologies.

Further Readings

External Links