Using a Multi-Perpectives Approach for Building a Socio-Technical
Information System
Sayeb Belhassen Yemna, Foughali Ibtissem and Hajjami Ben Ghezala Henda
RIADI Lab., The National School of Comp. Sciences, University Campus of Manouba, Tunisia
Keywords: Socio-technical Information System, BPM, BPMO.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach for developing Socio-Technical Information Systems - STIS with
integrating social, business, and technical needs of an enterprise. As a first aim of our proposed approach is
to ensure that both technical and human factors are given equal weight in the design process. As a second
objective is to provide the right information at the right place and the right time and thereby enable
communication between people, machine and computer, and their efficient cooperation and coordination. To
build an STIS, we propose a multi-perspective approach based on 4 perspectives, namely: usage (resources)
perspective, ESB perspective, business process modeling perspective, and SOA perspective. We use the
Business Process Modeling Ontology in considering the different perspectives.
1 INTRODUCTION
When developing an information system, we need
adequate underlying enterprise models that would
help appropriately considering the real-life business
context in which the information system would have
to operate. This challenge is being addressed by
numerous researchers whose efforts have been
inspired by the goal of closing the gap between
enterprise modeling and software design. Enterprises
have to become agile, sensitive to changes in market
forces, and capable of responding with incremental
modifications in business and services provided
(adaptation) as well anticipating radical changes by
responding with new and breakthrough business
models (innovation).
Recent trends in the development of information
systems are associated with intention to consider the
social system and the technical system with equal
weight.
On the one hand, the need of integrating enterprise
systems and technical systems calls for novel ICT
framework models and solutions, such as “EIS” -
Enterprise Information Systems which refer to
organizational implementations of commercial
software packages that enable the integration of
transaction-oriented data and business processes
through an organization (Markus and Tanis, 1999).
But to date there is a wrong understanding of those
systems. The prominent current idea is that an
enterprise information system is a product like for
example a car (Dietz, 2014). We aim at re-established
people who work on the enterprise as the ‘parts‘ of
every organization. They deliver services to each
other and to the environmental actors through
transactions. Those transactions are generally
represented through business models which describe
the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers,
and captures value.
Our main objective in this paper is to propose a
Socio-Technical Information System approach –
STIS, which integrates the social, business, and
technical needs of an enterprise. As a first aim of our
proposed STIS is to ensure that both technical and
human factors should whenever possible be given
equal weight in the design process. As a second
objective is to provide the right information at the
right place and the right time, and thereby enable
communication between people, machine and
computer and their efficient cooperation and
coordination. (Mumford, 2006). A socio-technical
system differs from other types of systems in that it
has human participants performing essential tasks
inside the system. However, as any other system, a
socio-technical system can be modeled as consisting
of a number of components interacting with each
other, and the system’s environment.
A socio-technical system is considered as
composed of two sub-systems: a technical system and
social system. The technical sub-system encompasses
217
Sayed Y., Ibtissem F. and Henda H.
Using a Multi-Perpectives Approach for Building a Socio-Technical Information System.
DOI: 10.5220/0006224002170220
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2016), pages 217-220
ISBN: 978-989-758-190-8
Copyright
c
 2016 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

both technology and processes. The social sub-system
encompasses the people who are directly involved in
the information system’s structure in which they are
embedded (Rabah Imache, 2012).
Our STIS approach is in line with the Service-
Oriented Architecture – SOA (Rafati, 2013).
To build an STIS, we propose a multi-perspective
approach based on a usage (resources) perspective, a
business process modeling perspective, a SOA
perspective, and an integration perspective. We use
the Business Process Modeling Ontology – BPMO, in
considering the different perspectives. In Section 2 of
this article, we will present the proposed approach
and we well give more details about the four
mentioned perspectives, and also about the role of
BPMO. In Section 3, we will illustrate the technical
architecture for building an STIS, based on SOA and
Enterprise-Service-Bus technologies. And we
conclude the article with the conclusion.
2 PROPOSED APPROACH
We start with the business process modeling
perspective which is considered essential. As
presented by (Chen, 2012) a business process consists
of workflows which are a series of interested tasks
with data flowing and processing. It can be a person-
to-person, person-to-system, system-to-system or a
combination of three. Business modeling is not only
about the business processes but also about the
construction that concerns the business strategy and
the design of organizational structures. The strategy
formulation is based on resources and capabilities.
The Object Management Group – OMG propose the
Business Process Modeling Notation - the BPMN 2.0
standard to support business process modeling
(Chinosi and Trombetta, 2012). Although the syntax
of BPMN is clearly defined, semantics is not
(Guedria, 2014). Since 2008, the OMG have tried to
solve this problem, by the defining “semantics of
business vocabulary and business rules” (SRVR)
(OMG 2008).
We argue that business process management
requires a comprehensive integration among a variety
of systems and services. Many authors have noticed
the importance of business aspects of Enterprise
Integration (Li and Williams, 2004) and have tried to
use it when building a business process model.
Vernadat (1996) gave his definition as follows:
“Enterprise integration is concerned with facilitating
information, control and material flows across
organization boundaries by connecting all the
necessary functions and heterogeneous functional
entities (information system, devices, applications
and people) in order to improve communication,
cooperation and coordination with this enterprise so
that the enterprise behaves as an integrated whole,
therefore enhancing its overall productivity,
flexibility and capacity for management of change”.
In 2003, the needs for physical connectivity in the
area of enterprises have grown into a much bigger and
richer perspective, Enterprise Interoperability (EI),
which is about both information and functionality
sharing between concerned parties (Vernadat, 2003).
We consider SOA as an integrated enterprise
model which can be applied to transform an
enterprise model to a flexible one in order to respond
to several important trends such as globalization
(Rafati, 2013).
We hope also to consider the role, competences
and needs of the human resources who are concerned
with the integration model. That’s why we consider a
usage perspective called also use resources
perspective. We consider this perspective as
important in building an STSI. We illustrate in Figure
1, the concept of actor which is defined as an
organizational unit with expressible and collective
knowledge, and have competences that reflect the
implementation of this knowledge in an operational
context, and assigned to a role within a business
process (Jabloun Marwen; Sayeb Yemna, 2013).
Figure 1: The use resources perspective.
So, to take into account all those perspectives:
web services integration and use resources, we use
BPMO. The business process modeling ontology is
part of an approach to modeling business processes at
the semantic level (Lalehrafati, 2013), integrating
knowledge about the organizational context,
workflow activates, and semantics.
BPMO describes a rich business process model,
as demanded by the Business Process Management
Community, using ontological descriptions to capture
workflow and organisational concerns in a uniform
and extensible manner, and reuses the results of
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Semantic-Web-Services –related research for the
description of interaction activities. There are various
advantages for using BPMO. As explained in (Cabral
and Liliana , 2009): Firstly, BPMO provides
comprehensive semantic annotations for business
processes that can be used for automated inference at
the business level while facilitating the translation to
the execution level. Secondly, BPMO provides links
from the process to organisational aspects, which can
be modeled independently for different domains.
Thirdly, BPMO can be used to verify at the semantic-
level restrictions applied to the workflow or certain
process activities. Finally, BPMO facilitates the
modeling of new (or mediation) processes, based on
existing ones as well as the discovery of services for
goal-based activities.
The four perspectives for building an STIS are
depicted in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The four perspectives for building an STIS.
3 IMPLEMENTATION
SOA, considered with regard to the implementation,
proposes an integrated model based on a central
registry which is called broker (Chen, 2012). SOA
makes the integration process easier as it would not
require software re-development.
Figure 3: Petals Environment.
Enterprise Service Bus - ESB is a bus architectural
technology to connect many disparate systems and
services together. It is organised on set of service
containers inter-connected over message-based bus.
The ESB technology, based on SOA, improves the
central registry mechanism of SOA to service
containers architectures. So we decide to experiment
the Petals SOA which is a set of tools providing a
complete range of software to create, manage and
monitor enterprise SOA solutions. Petals propose a
context and role management through its containers.
As illustrated in Figure 3, all tools adhere to open
standards and proven use, robust, high performance
technologies.
4 CONCLUSION
In this paper we have proposed a multi-perspective
approach for building a socio-technical information
system (STIS). Our objective was to use the Business
Process Modeling Ontology (BPMO) in considering
the different perspectives. BPMO describes a rich
business process model using ontological
descriptions to capture workflow and organisational
concerns in a uniform and extensible manner. To
implement our approach, we use the Petal ESB
environment.
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