From Business Processes to Service-based Process Spaces

Professor Boualem Benatallah (CSE, UNSW)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2008-03-25
TIME: 14:00:00 - 15:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

ABSTRACT:
Over the last decade, capabilities arising from advances in online technologies, especially Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), enabled enterprises to increase productivity, simplify automation, and extend business to locations far beyond their normal operations. Enterprises also embraced emergent process-aware services that enabled automation to gain more visibility in process executions. The focus of process improvement has expanded to include monitoring, analysis and understanding of business processes. Now, at all levels, business process monitoring and management is firmly recognised as a strategic priority for modern enterprises. However, while business process management and monitoring have enabled enterprises to increase efficiency, new usability challenges have also emerged. These challenges are increasing the pressure for enterprises to look at business processes from an end user's perspective. In this talk, we propose Process Views as new abstractions focusing on re-conceptualising the form and function of existing business process management systems to create a new generation of service and process-centric systems to better support the management of personal, ad-hoc, and as well as structured business processes over multiple applications and data sources. We further define and propose Process Spaces as a new research agenda for the business process research community. The term Process Space refers to the superimposition of Process Views over heterogeneous IT systems for the purposes of simplifying access to multiple applications and data sources and to provide the means to manage process views in a unified and flexible manner.

BIO:
Benatallah is a Professor at CSE, UNSW. He is well known for developing fundamental concepts and techniques in Web service composition and engineering. He is one of the most cited researchers in service oriented computing. He obtained over $2 millions and half in research funding from ARC and DEST competitive grants (excluding ARC Research Network grants). He has published more than 130 refereed papers including 33 journal papers. Most of his papers appeared in very selective and reputable conferences and journals. He is frequently invited to give keynote talks and tutorials on service computing in international conferences.

Benatallah has been PC chair of three main international conferences (BPM'05, ICSOC'05, WISE'07). He is the general chair of ICSOC'08 to be held in Sydney. He has acted as a key official (tutorial chair, workshops chair, publication chair, area chair) for several international conferences. He has been guest editor of five special issues for reputable international journals including ACM TOIT. He has been a PC member of all the reputable international conferences in his reaseach areas including VLDB, ICDE, WWW, EDBT, MDM, ICSOC, ICWS and ER. He is member of the steering committee of the international conference on Business Process Management. He is on the editorial board of numerous international journals. He was visiting Professor at INRIA-LORIA, Claude Bernard University (France), University of Blaise Pascal (Clermont Ferrand, France), Trento University (Italy, 2007). As chair of the CSE research committee, he was member of the team (comprising multiple university, government and industry partners) that constructed the successful bid for the new Smart Services CRC, which was awarded $30m in federal funding in 2007. He is the leader of the UNSW node, ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure. He is the founder and leader of the Service Oriented Research Group at the school of CSE, UNSW.