An Experiment on Creating Enterprise Specific BPM Languages and Tools

TR-2008-102, Author: Steen Brahe

Steen Brahe
March 2008

Abstract

Many enterprises use their own domain concepts in modeling business process and use technology in specialized ways when they implement them in a Business Process Management (BPM) system.In contrast, BPM tools used for modeling and implementing business processes often provide a standard modeling language, a standard implementation technology and a fixed transformation that may generate the implementation from the model. This makes the tools inflexible and difficult to use.This paper presents another approach. It applies the basic model driven development principles of direct representation and automation to BPM tools through a tool experiment in Danske Bank, a large financial institute; We develop business process modeling languages, tools and transformations that capture Danske Banks specific modeling concepts and use of technology, and which automate the generation of code. An empirical evaluation shows that Danske Bank will possibly gain remarkable improvements in development productivity and the quality of the implemented code.This leads us to the conclusion that BPM tools should provide flexibility to allow customization of languages, tools and transformations to the specific needs of an enterprise.

Technical report [TR-2008-102] in IT University Technical Report Series, January 2008. Available as PDF.