BUSINESS PROCESS EMBEDDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

For Flexibility and Adaptability

Marc Rabaey, Eddy Vandijck

MOSI,Vrije Universiteit Brussel,Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, Belgium

Koenraad Vandenborre, Herman Tromp

Software Lab Ghislain Hoffman,Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Martin Timmerman

Information Technology,Royal Military Academy, Brussels, Belgium

Keywords: Business processes, embedded information systems, information, strategy, enterprise architecture,

intelligence.

Abstract: In this ever faster changing world, organisations are faced with the need to have flexible processes. This is

only possible if these processes have full control over their supporting information systems, which we

propose to embed into the business processes, in stead of a global, common enterprise information system.

Therefore we are introducing a fifth stage in the architecture maturity model of Ross to implement these

Embedded Information Systems.

1 INTRODUCTION

Organisations need to continuously adapt to

changing business environments. However, the

justified desire for a flexible business processes

support is impossible without adaptive software.

In this paper we describe a proposal for a

business process embedded information system.

First, we will look at information and describe how

it relates to the business. Information is not only

needed at operational level but it also provides raw

material for intelligence in the decision process.

Next we will discuss the enterprise architecture

where all components (information, business

processes and Information and Communication

Technology) are brought together in one framework

and we state our proposal. Finally, before some

conclusions we give indications for further research.

2 INFORMATION

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

defines information as any communication or

representation of knowledge such as facts, data, or

opinions in any medium or form, including textual,

numerical, graphic, cartographic, narrative, or

audiovisual forms (OMB A-130). Knowledge itself

is the awareness and understanding of information

gained through experience or observation or through

reasoning (deduction and induction).

Burkan (1991) states that information has four

functions:

• Mandated;

• Control;

• Management;

• Leadership.

Compulsion causes the first, tactical survival of

the enterprise is the concern of the second. Much of

the attention regarding information is given to these

functions in Information and Communication

Technology (ICT) less to the latter two. The

strategic management use of information reflects to

minimise surprises. Its effectiveness is measured in

the ability to detect and anticipate, both short term

and long term. Contrary to control, which is

inwardly focused, strategic management is more

outwardly focused. If strategic management is the

ability to see the future, then leadership is the ability

144

Rabaey M., Vandijck E., Vandenborre K., Tromp H. and Timmerman M. (2006).

BUSINESS PROCESS EMBEDDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS - For Flexibility and Adaptability.

In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - DISI, pages 144-150

DOI: 10.5220/0002464501440150

 SciTePress

to shape the future. It is measured by how well the

leaders can move the enterprise's resources to new

directions (Burkan, 1991).

Related to this and before discussing these

business processes, Art of War (Bernard, 1976) is

briefly introduced, because its principles prescribe

the way of doing business.

3 BUSINESS

3.1 Art of War

To Bernard (1976), there are three principles of the

Art of War:

• Balance between Goals and Means;

• Liberty of Action;

• Economy of Forces.

The first principle has one rule: the permanent

seeking of intelligence, inside and outside the

organisation (see below). The balance between goals

and means is about determination of the right

objectives, given the environment and the available

and/or possible needed resources related to these

objectives. The result is the Grand Strategy of the

entire organisation. As a consequence of this

balance, two other strategies can be derived:

Business and Resources Strategies. The first is

focused on the creation and the deployment of the

core competences to attain the imposed objectives,

while the latter is focused on the means and the

processes to support the first (Rabaey, 2004, 2004b).

The liberty of action is about security: avoiding,

preventing as much as possible hostile actions of

other organisations and the assuring of the

communication lines (logistics, information (for

intelligence)). The economy of forces treats the

economical and right use of the resources (efficiency

and effectiveness).

The deeper in the hierarchy of the organisation

the less impact have the leaders on the resources

aspects and the scope of their business levels.

Therefore in the ever faster changing world, the

structure becomes less hierarchical, so flexibility is

gained. This implies that these leaders (and/or

managers) need to have access to more information

and have a more extended information system.

3.2 Business Processes

An information system supports the organisation and

consequently its business processes. Rabaey (2004a)

defines a business process as a logical set of

activities that consumes resources to attain its

objectives.

Now, information in the processes is used on

different levels: steering information, operative

information and historical information. These types

of information will be found in BPM-tools. The last

years we can see an effort to merge BPM-aspects

and ICT-aspects into one tool.

However a mental gap exists between both

worlds. BPM-people think process-wise, while ICT-

people think application-wise, meaning only some

parts of the processes are automated and relevant

information are stored in databases. Reporting on

transactions is based on the information kept in this

databases. As a matter of fact, only historical

information is kept in these databases. Information

about steering and executing the processes are not

stored in databases, but in the models of automated

workflows, only a data-query cannot be performed

on these models.

Automating partly or totally a business process

was first done by a workflow system. Kobielus

(1997) defines a workflow as the flow of

information and control in a business process (p.

32).

For the leaders and managers of organisations, it

is useful to be able to query these business processes

and workflows for a better control.

3.3 Business Integration

In the era of merges and virtual organisations

(McHugh, 1995), business integration becomes

important. Business processes and workflows now

span multiple organisations. They start with the

expression of the needs of a customer and end with

the satisfaction of his/her need (and the

administration). Different levels of integration are

possible: Strategy, strategic, operational and

operative (Rabaey, 2005c).

Strategy Integration is when two or more

organisations decide to develop and to adopt one

global strategy for all the concerned organisations.

So everything is integrated and the multiple

organisations are seen as one.

If the common interest of two or more parties is

of such a strategic importance that one or more

business processes are integrated and possibly

business units are integrated, the term Strategic

Integration is used. Its main characteristics are the

set up of common business and resources strategies

and by consequence a common information

management, next to the individual ones of the

involved parties.

Within Operational Integration, no common

business or resources strategies are set up. From the

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145

respective individual strategies, a common

Operational Strategy is deduced. Neither a common

information management is established, only

conventions are defined.

Operative Integration is, looked upon from a

strategic point of view, the weakest of the possible

forms of integration. In this case, no common

strategy and even no common Operational Strategy

are formed. The impact on ICT is that for the

realisation of the integration merely interaction

standards between business processes have to be

defined. For these purposes, no information

management has to be defined, a merely commercial

contract between two or more parties is sufficient.

3.4 Strategy and Capabilities

Kaplan (2005) states that strategy at many

companies is almost completely disconnected from

execution. Therefore Kaplan (2005) proposes a new,

dedicated unit to orchestrate both to help the bridge

the divide. However the military deployment

(communication) of strategy through operation

orders exists since ancient times (Bernard, 1976,

Lidell Hart, 1991, Rabaey, 2004a, 2004b).

Nevertheless, the implementation of the balanced

scorecard (Kaplan, 1996) in the enterprise has

enabled the deployment and feedback of the

strategy. Kaplan (2005) gives an example of the US

Army, which applied the balanced scorecard for the

deployment and communication of the strategy (and

for the feedback). This alignment on the civil

balanced scorecard system enabled the

“demilitarisation” of the strategy deployment, so that

civil partners of the US Army can now better

understand the military context.

Rabaey (2005b) proposes a new type of balanced

scorecard to better suite the principles of the Art of

War (Rabaey, 2004a). The Board of an enterprise

would like the enterprise to have some effects on the

society (outcomes) by using its capabilities, which

will then perform actions (output) to obtain these

effects. The sum of these effects is the vision of the

enterprise. The wanted effects will be described in a

number of scenarios. Therefore the CEO will

configure capabilities to perform actions for all

relevant scenarios. In the ever faster changing world,

these capabilities have to be flexible and easy to

reconfigure.

Modules deliver the necessary capabilities,

where one module can serve multiple capabilities.

These modules are composed of resources. In the

process area of capabilities generation, modules

and/or resources are acquired following investment

and recruiting plans (acquisition function). So we

have a schema of outcomes – outputs – capabilities –

modules – resources.

3.5 Enterprise Application

Integration

With the hype around Business Process

Reengineering (Hammer, 1993) and the raise of the

Internet, more specifically e-Business, priority was

given to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of

the business processes. The processes have to act

and react more agile in the faster world economy.

In a later stage, when simple information

exchange by itself was no longer sufficient, and the

need for more intelligent integration, for instance on

procedures and the semantics of the data, became

clear, a solution was found in Enterprise Application

Integration (EAI). In related research however

(Vandenborre, 2003), it is shown that EAI by itself

is only an end to the means. A more complete

solution is found in the “logical bus architecture”

and its implementation on a technical, organisational

and informational level.

So, EAI was the response to the interconnection

of information system islands between different

functional domains in a company or network of

companies throughout the Internet. In this context

web services became the way to go for most of those

companies (Zimmerman, 2003, Rabaey, 2003).

Now, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and

e-Business are evolving towards Service-Oriented

Architecture (SOA) by using Web Technology as

Web Services. The logical bus architecture became

SOA. The main reason is that flexibility can be

obtained. (Rabaey, 2005a).

However information management is very

difficult in these situations, because of the fact that

organisations want to continue to integrate the new

area into their information model, but still want to be

master of the information model even integrated.

The larger the information model, the tougher

become the semantics.

3.6 Information Model

Rebuilding the information model can be started

from the databases systems. However research has

shown that applications contain a lot of meta-data

and data structures. Research by Rever SA (a spin-

off of the Belgian university Notre Dame de la Paix)

shows that 40 to 60% of the data structure and flow

in ICT are in the applications and are thus not in

databases. The University Notre Dame de la Paix is

developing the software DB-Main to do a reversed

engineering by analysing the databases and the

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programs. The result is a conceptual model from

which a logical model for any type of database

system can be derived down to the operative

schemes (Hainaut, 2003, Hick, 2003, Henrard,

2003).

Since the environment of the organisation is

permanently changing and thus the organisation

also, the information system of the organisation has

to be adapted to the new situation. As a consequence

part of the databases will change, so that after a

while a new re-engineering has to be performed.

So, if a business process could be fully

automated into workflows and it holds itself the

information, then a consistent part of the producible

and needed information will be embedded in the

business process. Referring to the capability

approach, the housekeeping of the information of a

capability is done by the management module.

4 DECISION MAKING

4.1 Intelligence

Information is not only needed for the business

processes or functions in an organisation (direction

and control of the uses of resources; the

effectiveness of the business). It is certainly the fuel

of the strategy development process (planning future

activities; linking the business with its environment

(Anderson, 1986). If a business process has to

choose itself the needed resources, then it may have

to seek for information to prepare its decision

making. The needed information to reduce the

uncertainty of the decision maker at a level that is

acceptable to him, is called intelligence (Rabaey,

2005a).

Intelligence is the product of the intelligence

process, which collects, analyses, integrates, and

interprets information. It disseminates the

intelligence to the customer, with the purpose to

reduce the uncertainty on a problem (decision)

and/or to improve the inference rules. And last but

not least, it makes the organisation “aware” of

information and therefore aware of knowledge.

4.2 Decision and Intelligence Process

As mentioned above, collecting intelligence is the

only rule of the first principle of the Art of War

(Balance between resources and objectives). If we

combine the decision process (on any level of the

organisation) with the intelligence process, then a

two way communication is needed. One way to

express the information need from the decision

making process to the intelligence process. Another

is n the opposite direction with the asked

information (pull) or with spontaneously generated

intelligence (push).

The intelligence process will check if the need

can be covered with information in its intelligence

base (see Rabaey 2005a for more details), if not then

it will give its network (sensors) the order to seek for

the relevant information. If it's found then the

assessment process leading eventually to intelligence

will be started.

Rabaey (2005a) proposes a SOA-based solution

–called Intelligence Bus- because of the fact that the

intelligence capability can be formed of modules,

which correspond with business steps in the

intelligence process. This intelligence bus can be

plugged in the management information system of a

business unit (process). As a matter of fact, it can

serve multiple business units, as long as strategic or

operational needs for it exist. Specific security rules

can restrict access to the intelligence bus.

So, small units (related to the strategic mother-

organisation) can have access to a large knowledge

and intelligence bases of the mother-organisation

and nevertheless have their own independent

information system. This results in an enormous

flexibility for these units (resources and

intelligence). Of course, these units provide the

mother-organisation and other units also with facts

and intelligence.

5 ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

5.1 Framework

Lots of different interpretations of the term

Enterprise Architecture do exist. These

interpretations range from, at one end of the

spectrum, the list of technological choices made in

an organisation concerning infrastructure and

application design to the other end of the spectrum

wherein Enterprise Architecture encompasses these

technological decisions but also sets guidelines to

information architecture and business architecture.

Therefore it is a necessity to consider Enterprise

Architecture broader than merely infrastructure

architecture and application architecture. This

necessity stems from the fact that applications are

build to support business processes and operate on

information gathered through these business

processes (see above). Hence, architecture only

concerned with infrastructure and application design

is insufficient to support a business because such an

Enterprise Architecture has no view on the business

and its dynamics and hence it cannot take

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precautions for changing business requirements or

the reuse of certain artefacts in other business

domains.

For these reasons, an Enterprise Architecture

consists of distinguished levels. The naming of the

distinguished levels may be different but at least the

general ideas as described hereunder should be part

of the Enterprise Architecture:

z Business Architecture is about the

description of the business processes as

viewed from a business perspective.

z Information Architecture describes the

information need of the business and its

processes.

z Application Architecture is about how to

implement the applications or ICT systems,

the programming paradigms and languages,

the development environment, software

documentation guidelines, release to

production procedures, etc.

z Infrastructure Architecture deals with

guidelines concerning hardware platforms,

network infrastructure, operating systems,

etc.

Ross (2003, 2004)) defines Enterprise

Architecture as “the organizing logic for

applications, data and infrastructure technologies, as

captured in a set of policies and technical choices,

intended to enable the firm’s business strategy”.

5.2 The Level of Architecture

Maturity

Ross (2003) defines four stages:

1. Application Silo Stage in which the

Enterprise Architecture is just the collection

of the architectures of isolated applications,

often implemented in different

technologies.

2. Technology Standardization Stage as the

first step towards an enterprise wide

Enterprise Architecture in which

technology gets standardized and often

centralization is put in place. The

deployment of resources shifts from

application development into the

development of a shared infrastructure.

This phase is further often characterized by

the introduction of data warehouses and

sporadic and not institutionalized business

management participation.

3. Data Rationalization Stage characterized by

an expansion of the enterprise architecture

to include process and data standardization.

The deployment of resources shifts from

application development into data

management and infrastructure

development. The involvement of senior

business managers becomes

institutionalized and a dialogue between

business managers and IT becomes

common practice. Very important in this

phase is the shift of data ownership from IT

towards the business. This phase is further

often supported by tools like ERP, CRM.

4. A Modular Architecture characterized by

enterprise wide global standards with

loosely coupled applications, information

and technology components to preserve the

global standards while enabling local

differences through modules extending the

core processes.

6 EMBEDDED INFORMATION

SYSTEM

6.1 The Fifth Stage of Enterprise

Architecture

This paper proposes to add a fifth stage, business

process embedded information systems. Due to the

ever faster changing environment of an organisation

and increasing interactions with it, a global and

central “steering” becomes quite impossible, if the

organisation aims flexibility and rapid response. So

the organisation delegates to the business units and

their processes. However, if the ICT is not federated

then the autonomy is jeopardised by the ICT-

applications. Therefore we propose to embed

information systems into business processes.

As seen with the Intelligence Bus, mostly all

aspects of the information system can be federated

without losing the consistency of the information

system of the mother-organisation. However before

going to the fifth stage, an organisation and its

underlying (business) units have to perform a

information model as described above,

simultaneously the organisational structure has to be

defined, and the business processes have to be

modelled in the Business Process Management

(BPM-) tool following the capability approach.

Once BPM and the conceptual information

model defined, then they have to be merged into a

global model (information and business processes),

where the capabilities should manage their own

(embedded) information system. But as already

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mentioned, it has to start with conceptual

information model to solve the problems of

information management.

Since the environment of the organisation is

permanently changing and thus the organisation

also, the information system of the organisation has

to be adapted to the new situation. As a consequence

part of the databases will change, so that after a

while a new re-engineering has to be performed at

organisational level.

So, if a business process could be fully

automated and it holds itself the information, then a

consistent part of the producible and needed

information will be embedded in the business

process. Referring to the capability approach, the

housekeeping of the information of a capability is

done by a (management) module (See also

Vandenborre, 2003).

6.2 The Possibilities with Integration

In the case of strategy integrations, Business Process

Embedded Information Systems (BPEIS) are

recommended for the new processes in the new

organisation. The ‘old’ processes can only receive

their BPEIS, if they have been re-engineered. In

function of the existing architecture and

infrastructure of the different former organisations,

the new organisation may opt to go through an EAI-

project before installing BPEIS. The same reasoning

is applicable for a single organisation.

Strategic integrations of business processes have

the advantage that they can start immediately with

BPEIS, since they have no legacy systems. Certainly

the different “mother-organisations” may have

legacy systems, but they can be interfaced or

integrated through the capabilities of SOA.

As already mentioned, within operational

integration no common business or resources

strategies are set up, only an operational strategy. If

one (or more) of the mother-organisations has the

adequate SOA capabilities then BPEIS can be

realised. Otherwise the duration of the business

integration will be the main decision element to

evaluate the implementation of BPEIS.

In almost all cases of operative integration,

BPEIS will not be implemented, since no common

business processes are existing.

6.3 Virtual Data Federation

The consequence of Business Process Embedded

Information System is that if somebody needs to

collect in formation then that person will have to

query each process management module. This

resembles to Virtual Data Federation or Enterprise

Information Integration (EII) issues.

Friedman (2004a) writes: “Gartner positions EII

as a goal, not a technology. The goal is to achieve a

state where the various data assets of the enterprise

are integrated to best meet the needs of the business:

– Delivering a timely and complete view of

critical entities and events

– Providing connectivity and accessibility to

data across multiple platforms and databases

– Ensuring the consistency of data

underpinning related applications

As such, the goal of EII differs little from the

general goals of data integration, which has been a

focus of enterprises for the last three decades.” At its

core, EII technology performs virtual data federation

based on distributed database queries (Friedman,

2004b, 2005).

However the biggest problem is to know if the

semantic of one item is the same in all the databases.

This is the added value of software like DB-Main

(Hicks 2003) which produces a conceptual or

semantic model of the organisational in formation.

From thereon through logical and physical models

the operative models are defined. Again, this will

only be a snapshot if the maintenance of all models

is not done. But since information system is

embedded in business processes or units, the burden

is less. However consistency with the organisational

level must be maintained.

7 FURTHER RESEARCH

This approach of business process embedded

information systems needs another way of making

decision in ICT-investments. Earlier works (Rabaey,

2004a, 2004b, 2005d) propose a holistic framework

for global ICT-investments. In the situation of

business process embedded information systems,

ICT is more federated. Business units have more

autonomy but are not independent from the mother-

organisation.

Research has already been done in the domain of

investments in Service-Oriented Architecture (called

Service-Oriented Investments). Since SOA is the

most suited environment to develop business process

embedded information systems, research on Service-

Oriented Investment will be continued.

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8 CONCLUSIONS

With the discussion on information and business in

the context of the need for flexibility, we came to the

conclusion that not only the processes themselves

have to be flexible but also the supporting software.

This is only possible if the business units or

processes can dispose on a autonomous way over

their information systems, more specifically their

“own” ICT-applications. Therefore we call it

business process embedded information systems. It

is however not independent because of the fact that

the ICT-applications and the underlying ICT-

infrastructure need to fit in the global ICT-

framework of the mother-organisation.

Further research is the adapted way of making

investments in the Service-Oriented Architecture.

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