Decisional systems are crucial for enterprise improvement. They allow the consolidation of heterogeneous data from distributed enterprise data stores into strategic indicators. An essential component of this data consolidation is the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process. In the research literature there has been very few work defining conceptual models for ETL processes. At the same time, there are currently many tools that manage such processes. However, each tool uses its own model, which is not necessarily able to communicate with the models of other tools. In this paper, we propose a platform-independent conceptual model of ETL processes based on the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) standard. We also show how such a conceptual model can be implemented using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a standard executable language for specifying interactions with web services.

ETL processes are the backbone component of a data warehouse, since they supply the data warehouse with the necessary integrated and reconciled data from heterogeneous and distributed data sources. However, the ETL process development, and particularly its design phase, is still perceived as a time-consuming task. This is mainly due to the fact that ETL processes are typically designed by considering a specific technology from the very beginning of the development process. Thus, it is difficult to share and reuse methodologies and best practices among projects implemented with different technologies. To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been yet dedicated to harmonize the ETL process development by proposing a common and integrated development strategy. To overcome this drawback, in this paper, a framework for model-driven development of ETL processes is introduced. The benefit of our framework is twofold: (i) using vendor-independent models for a unified design of ETL processes, based on the expressive and well-known standard for modeling business processes, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and (ii) automatically transforming these models into the required vendor-specific code to execute the ETL process into a concrete platform.

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ABSTRACT

The paramount importance of project portfolios for business drives managers to search for highly efficient support tools to overcome complex challenges of their management. A major tradeoff is to acquire tools able to produce a convenient portfolio project prioritization process, on which business investments are decided. However, by using existing Project Portfolio Management Systems (PPMS), many concurrent projects in a portfolio are usually prioritized and planned in the upstream life-cycle phases according to financial criteria, and overlooking the portfolio alignment to enterprise strategies and the availability of resources, although their importance. In this paper, we propose a conceptual formalization of PPMS with respect to a double portfolio prioritization process that performs two levels of selections according to both: i.) Strategy alignment, including returns on investment, size, and total cost; and ii.) Execution capability, as the organization should be able to manage and deliver the selected projects' outcomes. The advantage of our PPMS framework is twofold. First, it is useful to be customized by designers to fit organization needs. Second it is built with respect to the double prioritization phase process, as an end-to-end process that guarantees optimal portfolios generation. Further, the proposed PPMS system and its identified functionalities are validated through an implementation of a prototype tool.