Dear Pedro,

Please refer to these publications:

1) Building Business Objects by Peter Eeles, Oliver Sims.

2) Business objects in corporate information systems by Jeff Sutherland

3) Business Objects by Oliver Sims (http://www.simsassociates.co.uk/book1/business_objects_2004_01_12.pdf)

4) Business Objects: Re-Engineering for Re-Use by Chris Partridge (http://www.borosolutions.co.uk/research/content/files/books/BusObj-Printed-20050531-with-watermark.pdf)

Kind regards,

Pawel.

Dear Pawel, thanks for the publications that I found very interesting. The (3) gives some origin and background to the concept. I did not have the time to analyse in detail, at least what seems that is the big-bang concept book by Oliver Sims.

Framing better the concept helps to clarify the context of a process, giving a way to understand how to identify the bottom processes and at the same time to articulate them, in business processes or even upper, in end-to-end processes. Considering processes as something that incorporates a set of rules that manage a business object.

Kind regards,

Pedro

For more information on the theoretical aspects of workflows, I can suggest you to read the phd thesis of Nick Russell on workflow patterns. Different patterns are explained in detail where you can find patterns on control flow, data flow, resource flow etc. The composition patterns and the associated Petri Net formalisms are well explained.

Dear Fahad I had that dilemma considering modelling or design, but I am shifting more to design, assuming that the modelling is somehow more related to as-is. I see it also in the area of technological processes or processes implementation, but the idea of the question is the identification of what processes should be designed in order to operationalize the business strategy, and in this context I think that business objects could be helpful to clarify them.

Probably I should change the question from process modelling to process design?

Considering that I am going down to technological processes, I think that I should read Russel, or I am missing something here?

We have been doing some research around Business Objects relating it to Semantic Web Technologies. If you are interested in this, you could read some of it from our Webpage. We also have been practicing Business process modeling based on Business objects and have Partners that have implemented successfully modeling architectures, especially in the government area, as there the same Business objects occur in multiple Areas and it is very hard to manage such a large number of process models without using the concept of business objects.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have read a bit about the concepts and found very interesting use of semantic web and ontologies to remove the duplication of similar concepts associated to the business objects and processes.

My idea is using business objects as a signal to identify when to stop the decomposition of business processes, starting at a top level. But sometimes this could lead to confusion especially when defining different descriptions to express the same concepts.

Until now in some projects that I am working I have been using a spreadsheet to sort terms, and I try to remove redundancies, it’s not very professional, but in my case I am working with small organizations (like sport federations and government companies acting mainly in the sport sector), and I don’t work with teams consultants.

But if I considered several organizations and a bigger amount of business objects, it could be very interesting using it to create ontologies to normalize the concepts and names of processes, activities and business objects identified.

All of this to say that I appreciated very much your suggestion, and I will try to analyze it with the attentions that it deserves…

Kindly regards,

Pedro Sobreiro

Hi Pedro, hope you are fine.

We have seen other approaches trying to define at which Level to stop decomposition and always found that it clearly relates to the objective why you are modeling. If you are modeling for e.g. clarifying communication between two departments in order to fulfil a customer order you will have a much different Level of Detail than when you try to model a process that should be executed by some workflow engine or a process that you would like to simulate. We use Business objects in process modeling in order to be able to manage models and in order to raise model Quality, as using different Terms for the same Thing makes People not understand the model and therefore they will not use it.

By the way: Do you know how to Keep the spell checker from capitalizing all my text?

Best regards, Frauke.

Hi Frauke, thanks for the answer.

I agree the modeling depends of the perspective, but I assume the top level modeling has less detail than low level (operations)... The need to understand end-to-end processes assumes less detail and a more broadband perspective combined with some sort of grouping sub processes, to encapsulate detail in lower levels... helping to reduce complexity.

This means that if we are starting in a higher level with less detail we could have several business objects associated, like "Customer History", "Customer Sales Opportunities" and "Customer Order". But if we go deeper probably we have a process (operational) to deal with customer orders, e.g. at the warehouse to pick up the goods to deliver using the main business object "Customer Order"... this could help to clarify when to stop the decomposition, defines the lower operational level...

But by doing this, associating processes to specific business objects, helps also the model quality... Clarify business objects contexts... But probably my cases are smaller...

Sorry I am not sure if I understand the question... Is possible to be more specific (detail)?

Best regards,

Pedro

If you look at my answer, you will find a lot of words with capital letters. There is some Kind of tool inside ResearchGate that keeps capitalizing words in my answers. This was the question I had.

Concerning the real subject: I think you can Cluster Business objects by processes, but again this will not be a one-to-one relation. You can have the same Business object in several Business processes (even starting to look from process overview; e.g. an order might be used in Sales process and in logistics process, which in most cases would be differentiated in an overview Level). But this might still be useful, as you can Group Business objects by contexts, especially process contexts (as you already mentioned in your answer). Still I doubt that it will help you in decomposing processes. Object hierarchies often are made of specialisation paths, which is a different way than the one process hierarchies are made of.

Hi Frauke!

Sorry, I didn't get it at the first time... I am using firefox and some plug-ins to check errors when I am typing, like grammarly... This type of behaviour could not be related to some automatic error correction in your web browser? I could say that's I bit strange, but I don't have that kind of problem...

Yes I agree, good point... I like the explanation and terms used. But if I am decomposing until the identification of a Business Object. Is the concept Business Object assumed as a generalization (abstraction) and is instantiation as a Data Object... Like seems to be articulated in Archimate? Because they seem to relate business processes and business objects and if we have a business object that could be instanciated or identified a data object, could mean that we have a detail level clarified?

Thanks for your excellent comments and questions?

Best regards,

Pedro Sobreiro