A case study on business process recovery using an e‐government system

Abstract

SUMMARY Business processes have become one of the key assets of organization, since these processes allow them to discover and control what occurs in their environments, with information systems automating most of an organization's processes. Unfortunately, and as a result of uncontrolled maintenance, information systems age over time until it is necessary to replace them with new and modernized systems. However, while systems are aging, meaningful business knowledge that is not present in any of the organization's other assets gradually becomes embedded in them. The preservation of this knowledge through the recovery of the underlying business processes is, therefore, a critical problem. This paper provides, as a solution to the aforementioned problem, a model‐driven procedure for recovering business processes from legacy information systems. The procedure proposes a set of models at different abstraction levels, along with the model transformations between them. The paper also provides a supporting tool, which facilitates its adoption. Moreover, a real‐life case study concerning an e‐government system applies the proposed recovery procedure to validate its effectiveness and efficiency. The case study was carried out by following a formal protocol to improve its rigor and replicability. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Approach to Business Process Recovery from Source Code

“…Currently, most organizations use information systems to automate some activities of the business process to provide more agility in performing them [3]. Nonetheless, information systems are not immune to the effects of time and along several maintenance, tend to become obsolete in their technologies [4].…”

“…The improved system supports the current business process and improves the Return On Investment (ROI) once its useful life is increased [3].…”

Practical Experiences in the Use of Pattern-Recognition Strategies to Transform Software Project Plans into Software Business Processes of Information Technology Companies

“…Henceforth, we will refer to MDA in this article. ITCs have been working with this paradigm with certain level of success [9][10][11][12]. ey often manage their operations using IT systems (ITSs) that may be classified, among others, in two categories: (i) process-aware information systems (PAISs) [2], where the concept of process is well defined, comprising models and traces of instance executions that are stored in an event log; and (ii) non-process-aware information systems (Non-PAISs), which are often Legacy Information Systems (LISs) [13][14][15][16], containing a Legacy Database (LDB) that stores states of ITC transactions.…”

“…According to van der Aalst [20], LDBs store a lot of hidden evidence or knowledge related to process execution, so that they may be good sources to extract Process dimensions, even in the case of Non-PAISs. Regarding BPD from Non-PAISs, some authors, such as Adam et al [21] and Zou et al [22], propose techniques to recover processes, whereas other researchers, such as Pérez-Castillo et al [10,23,24], Arevalo [25], and Arevalo et al [26][27][28], use an MDA-based approach called Process Archeology (PA) for that purpose.…”

Predicting temporal violations for parallel business cloud workflows

“…Business workflow is a type of workflow that characterizes many e‐business and e‐government processes, such as bank transactions and tax returns. () There are 2 notable features of business workflow in many real‐world applications: (1) there are usually a large number of workflow instances running in a parallel and distributed fashion, where each instance represents a unique customer or system request, and (2) business workflows have to meet strict time constraints to achieve timely completion of business goals . Given the requirements of temporal constraints and massive concurrency in the processing of workflows, organizations are looking for ways to move their business process management environment to the Cloud.…”