A service-oriented, user-centered approach to Business Process Management (BPM) in a university setting

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1. A service-oriented, user-centered approach to Business Process Management (BPM) in a university setting Ryan Dellolio The George Washington University Web Program Manager Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Adjunct Lecturer Department of Information Systems School of Business Ongoing Research University environments have recurrent and transient IT infrastructure needs in pursuit of research, administration and instruction. Provisioning these resources on-demand is the marriage of an IT resource request process – the business process – and IT service delivery to fulfill that request. Ongoing research at The George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences is exploring a managed approach to IT resource provisioning and the following: Example “Faculty member requests new website for a research group.” Current State Potential Future State Preliminary Results GWU is currently evaluating three potential solutions: 1 IBM Business Process Manager 2 Microsoft BizTalk Server 3 Custom in-house (probably web) application Discussion Such a system of IT request fulfillment will provide faster, more efficient service for University faculty and staff who make routine requests of the IT services group. In some cases, IT staff may not be involved in IT service delivery at all. The reliability and consistency of BPM methodologies with Business Process Automation (BPA) capabilities hold the promise of increasing user satisfaction, lowering costs and streamlining operations. Next Steps Next steps include solidifying detailed requirements, identifying candidate IT services and associated processes, establishing an evaluation framework for potential solutions and then moving forward with a pilot. References [1] H.H. Shahri, J.A. Hendler and A.A. Porter, “Software Configuration Management Using Ontologies”, Proc. Third Int’l Workshop Semantic Web Enabled Software Eng., June 2007. [2] W. Abramowicz, D. Fensel, and U. Frank, “Semantics and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Business Process Management”, Business & Information Systems Engineering, January 2010. Service calls enable the BPM system to provision IT services, while semantics provide a common language for describing the resources and configuration. Combined with business process definitions this provides powerful agility, consistency and automation. [1] [2] The Semantic Approach BPM Semantics Standard Resource Descriptions (RDF) Configuration Ontologies (OWL) SOA Pre-defined calls to infrastructure Methodology Automate IT service requests using BPM system Map request archetypes to processes and service calls Create configuration ontologies, resource descriptions Identify candidate IT services and associated processes • What, if any, are the benefits of structured service-oriented BPM at GWU to meet common IT resource needs? • How can we build an effective analytical framework for the potential BPM and SOA implementation that accounts for usability of such an implementation? Our approach for automating IT service provisioning is as follows: Other example requests include: requests for shared file storage, requests for accounts on high performance computing clusters, requests for user accounts, requests for maintenance.