Complaisance, Care Duty and Ownership of Artefacts
Having read several papers on artefact-centric business process modelling we have found two approaches [1]: (1) artefacts as finite state machines and (2) focussing on the life cycle of artefacts. Both approaches require business analysts to validate the artefact model. We strive however, to a situation in which not the business analyst, but the business specialist is in control. The business analyst plays no longer a role or at most plays an advisory role.
The business specialist must make his/her artefacts complaisant to other artefacts. Complaisance naturally seeks a balance between leanness and richness. Leanness is required to make data quickly available and richness to make as much data available at once. During design time artefact modellers will look for the primary source of data to quickly transition to a new state but will also look to get as much data as possible in one go to limit the number of states and to limit the number of events it subscribes to. Remember that artefacts subscribe to events which are interesting to them. These events carry the information of the artefact that triggered the event.
Primary sources are artefacts that obtain the data from the end-user. There should always be one primary source. In case a (primary) source is not visible to an artefact, the source may not exist, or the authorisation of the source is limited. In such case, the authorisation may be altered to grant read access or one may create an intermediary artefact whose sole purpose is to make the data available to other artefacts.
One may decide to use intermediary artefacts as an interface to other domains. for example, the financial controllers in a company will by default block access to financial artefacts. Only data that has been approved for disclosure may be shared with other artefacts. To prevent that the ACL of all primary sources are altered to disclose the data, a special intermediary artefact is created which holds only data that may be disclosed.
Therefore, in our case, a business specialist being in control means that he/she must be able to make the artefact complaisant to other artefacts. This requires that the artefact is taken care of, which in a changing world requires constant care. The business specialist has a care duty and therefore must own the artefact.
This brings us to the tuple: complaisance, care duty and ownership. An example implementation of an artefact system was developed by AvenQure [2].
1. Gerede, C.E.: Modeling, Analysis, and Composition of Business Processes. PhD thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of California at Santa Barbara (2007)
2. "Conduct by AvenQure | Non-intrusive Workforce Empowerment.", http://avenqure.com/conduct/, AvenQure, May 2016. Web. 18 May 2016.
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