Information Technology Reference
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Research on Web service-based business processes has also extensively inves-
tigated the issue of monitoring. Web service-based processes are intrinsically
cross-organizational, since each orchestrated Web service can in principle be ex-
posed by a different organization. In this context, we can distinguish between
intrusive
and
non-intrusive
monitoring [2,13]. The former involves the interleav-
ing of service and monitoring activities at runtime, whereas the latter separates
the business from the monitoring logic, since information relevant for monitoring
can be captured non-intrusively while a process is executing, e.g. intercepting
service operation calls and responses or from the log of the process engine [13].
Cross-organizational settings require non-intrusive monitoring, since it would
not be feasible to implement a different instrumentation to satisfy the moni-
toring requirements of each different party with which an organization has to
interact. Furthermore, while the aforementioned approaches only consider the
monitoring of performance variables, such as response time and availability, or
simple conditions describing the behavior of a service, in this paper we take a
business perspective, since PBWD considers business-related information that
is deemed relevant by the user of a process.
The innovation of the approach presented in this paper concerns also the
aggregation, according to user-specific dependencies, of monitoring information
to design a customized monitoring process. Web service-based process monitor-
ing considers also aggregation of monitoring information from multiple sources
[2,13]. However, monitoring information, such as the timestamps of service calls
or process variables, are meaningful only at a technical level, and they require
further translation before becoming meaningful to and, therefore, relevant for a
process user [12]. PBWD considers only informational products meaningful at
a business level and, therefore, enables us to design monitoring processes using
informational products that do not need translation.
3 Using PBWD for Collaborative Process Monitoring
This section introduces some background on the PBWD approach and shows
how PBWD can be used to generate monitoring processes. PBWD is a scientifi-
cally grounded method for business process (re)design. The focus of this method
is on the design of processes that deliver informational products, the so-called
workflow processes
. The PBWD methodology takes the structure of the
informa-
tional product
, which is described in a Product Data Model (PDM), as a starting
point to derive a process model. Informational products are, for instance, a deci-
sion on an insurance claim, the allocation of a subsidy, or the approval of a loan.
Based on the input data provided by the client or retrieved from other systems,
the end (informational) product is constructed step-by-step. In each step new
information is produced based on the specific data available for the case.
Over recent years, PBWD has shown to be a successful business process
(re)design method [15]. For instance, the annual reporting process for mutual
funds at a large Dutch bank was successfully redesigned using PBWD. The in-
sights in the informational product, achieved by PBWD, led to a 50% decrease
in throughput time [20].
