Tag: event

Communicating Business Process and Software Models: Quality, Understandability, and Maintainability

by Marco Brambilla, posted in software engineering

For the first time, this year we organized a workshop on Communicating Business Process and Software Models: Quality, Understandability, and Maintainability (CPSM 2013). [see official web site]

Hajo Reijers giving his keynote talk at CPSM workshop
Hajo Reijers giving his keynote talk at CPSM workshop

It was held on September 23rd, 2013 at the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands in conjunction with the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance.

The motivation of the workshop stands in the fact that, in recent years, models have become a paramount means for communication. This gained more attention in research on process modeling and software modeling. Both communities discuss issues on models, modeling languages, and their use and perception, such as model understandability, complexity of modeling
languages, actual usage of language features, cognitive aspects, human perception and subjective perspectives on models, and related topics. These aspects are extremely important for the adaption of modeling languages both for process design and software development. Furthermore, models are becoming more and more important as a communication tool across disciplines and enterprise roles. In particular understandability and readability of models is a key success factor for comprehensive modeling of enterprise practices and IT systems. This entails the possibility of modeling different perspectives of the enterprise, and yet grant coherency and integration between the models. The CPSM 2013 workshop was held as a multi-disciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners actively working on quality, usability and maintainability of software and process models. The goal of the CPSM workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners in the area of Business Process (re)design and software maintenance, to discuss about and exchange ideas on quality, understandability and maintainability of business process models, of software models, and of the relationships between business process models, software models, and system implementation.

CPSM workshop attendees suring one discussion session
CPSM workshop attendees suring one discussion session

The event was a success, it gathered more than 15 attendees between software engineers, BPM practitioners and academics, and was a great occasion for discussion.

The organization of the event was by Irene Vanderfeesten, Dirk Fahland (both from Eindhoven University of Technology) and myself.
Some pictures of the event are reported here, while others are available on the workshop site, together with the slides of the keynotes and additional materials.

If you are interested in the event and in contributing to organizing or hosting its future editions, feel free to get in touch.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Efficient Subgraph Matching – Keynote by V.S. Subrahmanian at ASONAM 2012

by Marco Brambilla, posted in big data, social network

V.S. Subrahmanian (Univ. of Maryland)
As part of the Data Management in the Social Semantic Web workshop (DMSSW workshop) at the ASONAM 2012 conference in Istanbul, Turkey, V.S. Subrahmanian (University of Maryland) gave an interesting talk on efficient subgraph matching on (social) networks.
Queries are defined as graphs themselves, with some of the places defined as constants and some defined as variables.
The complexity of queries over graphs is high, due to the large number of joins to be performed even in case of fairly simple queries.
The size of the query is typically relatively small with respect to the entire dataset (network). The proposed approaches are useful for scale of at least tens of millions of nodes in the network.

How to work on disk

The mechanism implemented is called DOGMA index and applies an algorithm called K-merge.
The algorithm builds a hierarchical index where I put at most K nodes of the graph in each index item. For obtaining that, I merge together connected nodes.You can do that randomly or more intelligently by trying to minimizing connections between nodes in different index items.
Example of DOGMA Index, where nodes of the original network (at the bottom) are merged in higher level representations in the level above (in this example, K = 4, since we have 4 nodes in each index position).
I don’t want to build the index by partitioning the whole graph, because it’s painful for large graphs. 
I start from a G0 graph, and I merge nodes until I get G1, G2, Gn graphs, each of them is more or less half the size of the previous, until Gn has K nodes or less. Then, I build the dogma index over Gn.
For the query, I can use a basic approach: identify the variable nodes that are immediately close to a constant node, and then find the possible satisfying values for those variables, starting from the constants. I can apply conditions considering distance constraints between constants and variables, as well as between candidate variable names. To allow this, I also save in every node of the index the distance of closest node in the other nodes. 

How to work on the cloud

This approach has been also implemented in the cloud, through the so called COSI Architecture, assuming a cloud of k+1 computing nodes. The implementation of the edge cuts that generates the index must be very quick and produce fairly good cuts (but not necessarily optimal).
The image below lists some of the references to S.V. works on the topic.
Some references to V.S. Subrahmanian works on subgraph matching.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

BPM and EA Europe Conference 2012 – the full Twitter story from all of us

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

The BPM and EA Conference 2012 is simply too big to follow in person in all its sessions and details. I’m trying here to summarize all the stories that are going on. Feel free to add your comments and experiences! (For sake of readability, the story will be visible once you open this post separately).

http://storify.com/marcobrambi/bpm-europe-and-eac-conference-2012.js[<a href=”http://storify.com/marcobrambi/bpm-europe-and-eac-conference-2012″ target=”_blank”>View the story “BPM Europe and EAC Conference 2012” on Storify</a>]

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Making Social BPM mean Business – Sandy Kemsley’s seminar at BPM Europe 2012 by IRM-UK

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

While attending the BPM Europe Conference 2012, I started by following the seminar by Sandy Kemsley on Social Business Process Management.
She brought up a large set of interesting issues related to Social BPM:

Social BPM dimensions

Dimensions of complexity can be orthogonalized and well managed:
  1. Structure: how much structured is the process
  2. Internal Collaboration: how much internal collaboration the process allows
  3. External Involvement: how many external actors can be involved
This is extremely interesting, as it unfolds the concepts that I was investigating in some of my past posts on social BPM options and adoption levels. But here the orthogonalization makes the problem much more crisp and clear.

Collaboration Spectrum

The span of collaboration can cover different levels:
  • Predefined participants
  • Selection of participants from a predefined set of enabled ones
  • Selection of any participants or participants self-selection

This is also close to the continuum of social BPM, but again focusing on one specific orthogonalized aspect at a time.

Social as a feature or as an application?

The point with Enterprise 2.0 is that several social tools exist now, and the challenge is how to put them together in a productive and coherent way, without irking to build yet another stack of silos, in the socialization domain. There is a huge social enterprise software confusion, and social BPM is part of it.
Socialization, as well as any other enterprise issue, should be tackled as a comprehensive problem at enterprise level. The main challenge is not to reduce this to simply selecting a set of social tools to be used. Social must become an attitude and a lifestyle in the enterprise.
You can get Social process discovery and modeling, and this is covered by several vendors. However, it’s much more interesting to have social process execution. This is covered by vendors such as HandySoft and Fujitsu. Major vendors like IBM are also expanding their features towards Adaptive Case Management (ACM), by covering as much as possible of this within their BPM products.

Process event streams

This is very similar to the Facebook timeline or other customer-oriented event streams. This is also a major user interface change in the enterprise. Events may have a direct link to underlying process models or instance. One can subscribe to a stream by topic or by author or other. Enterprise systems get usable, mobile and quickly accessible.
Producers of these class of products include: Appian Tempo, Tibco Tibbr, IBM Blueworks Live.

Other aspects

Several other ways exist for making BPM social, such as online communities (internal centers of excellence, external communities of practice, marketplaces): this is covered by IBM BlueWorks, Appian, and Software AG Aris. In small, this is also what the WebRatio Store is aiming at in the near future (while now it’s mainly focused on WebML features).

Some producers are offering BPM Software as a service solutions, with cloud deployment(Appian Anywhere, Fujitsu InterstageBPM, Cordys Process Factory and other emerging ones). WebRatio is also moving towards the cloud, but at the moment the development part is based on the Eclipse-based  standalone tool suite.

Organization and Impacts

While the technology is not cutting edge any more, organizational impacts and benefits are still challenging for the enterprise.
Social Business has now an ad-hoc social business maturity model. 
The social BPM maturity gap. Internal: above, orange line. External: below, yellow line.
You have two dimensions:
  1. internal versus external social business (Y axis)
  2. business maturity level (X axis)
    1. Ad-hoc
    2. Engaged
    3. Structured
    4. Managed
    5. Optimized
    6. Unified 
The current status of most companies is currently in the state “engaged-structured” internally and “structured-managed”externally.
The main challenges are on culture and collaborativeness. Enterprises need to trigger a participatory culture, considering people’s contribution independently of their role, increasing transparency and openness, allowing and empowering employees to deviate from predefined processes.
A nice bottom line for the discussion is that Social BPM means to monitor events and not outcomes of BPM. 

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

"My" events for 2012

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

Well, this year I’m involved in the organization of so many events that it’s worth (for myself) to track them down in a single blog post, so as to keep track of all the activities and places I’ll be experiencing.
I’m reporting here all the events, just for sake of recording (and for anybody to browse):

  1. SocialBPM summer school in Como, July 2012
  2. CrowdSearch workshop at WWW 2012
  3. International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2012)
  4. Model-driven Web Engineering workshop (MDWE 2012) at ICWE 2012
  5. Very Large Data Search workshop (VLDS 2012) at VLDB 2012
  6. CloudMDE workshop at ECMFA 2012
  7. SOHuman 2012 workshop at SocialCom 2012
  8. VORTE 2012 workshop at EDOC 2012
.. and a few others. This is not the full list of the events I’ll be attending though (which includes some more).
I especially recommend to look into the Social BPM summer school:

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Code Generation 2012 – from geeky (programming) interfaces to user interfaces

by Marco Brambilla, posted in modeling
Code Generation 2012 logo

For the second year, I’ve been attending the event called Code Generation, held in Cambridge, UK and organized by Software Acumen. For the second year, the event has been a quite good mix of practitioners, vendors and experienced evangelists.

During the event, Emanuele Molteni (product manager of WebRatio) and I have given a talk on User Interaction modeling problems, requirements and initiative, with special attention to the IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language) standardization activity within OMG. I think the problem is perceived as definitely relevant by the community, as demonstrated by the lively discussion that followed the presentation.

I would say that the main characterization of this year is really towards User Interaction modeling. A lot of sessions and speeches (including ours) addressed this problem from different perspectives, spanning from multi-platform mobile apps, to interaction modeling, to interpreted approaches for enterprise UIs, and so on. Even during our presentation, the audience admitted that they have built tens of domain specific languages (DSLs) for modeling some aspects of UIs. If you are interested in the topic, you can have a look at our presentation here:
Experiences and requirements for User Interaction Modeling

WebRatio has been sponsoring the event, and as a sponsor also got a booth at the conference (see picture). We have been interacting with a lot of visitors ad got enthusiastic feedback.

WebRatio booth at Code Generation 2012.

The event also features several interesting sub-events, sessions and keynotes, notably:

.. and several other interesting talks. 
In summary, happy to attend and looking forward to next edition.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Presentation at Code Generation 2012: User Interaction Modeling: current status of the standardization process

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

Together with Emanuele Molteni, I will give a speech at Code Generation 2012 on: 
User Interaction Modeling: current status of the standardization process, from the requirements to the language.

In this presentation we will go through our 15-years experience of user interaction modeling for the Web, based on WebML and WebRatio, and we will delve into the challenge of making our own domain-specific language (DSL) a standard. We will present the ongoing activities at OMG towards the standardization of a Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML): we will discuss the requirements and the scope of the sought standard, and we will propose a solution based on our 15-year experience in Web interaction design. We will be inspired by our WebML language, but we will also explain how to go beyond that, so as to cover mobile, multi-touch, collaborative applications, independently from the implementation platform.
We will also show how a dedicated interaction modeling tool like WebRatio can ease the development through a plethora of facilities supporting the developer, including: visual debugging, quick prototyping, multi-platform and cloud deployment, and so on.

I look forward to the exciting days in Cambridge and to the feedback we will get from the public.
If you have suggestions or proposals on the topics you wish us to cover during the speech, feel free to let us know!

If you want to know more about the IFML standardization at OMG, you can visit these posts on IFML. The presentation given on IFML at CG 2012 is available on Slideshare and visible here (see below).

WebRatio is a proud sponsor of the event. See you in Cambridge then!

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Seminar on Social BPM at SMAU 2011 Milano

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

Just to keep track of the events I’ve been involved recently, here is a quick summary of the seminar I gave together with Stefano Butti at SMAU Milano 2011. The topic was Social BPM. You can find here some picture, an interview (in Italian) and the slides I used (in English).

Other pictures of the event are available on the WebRatio site.
The presentation I gave at SMAU is available on SlideShare:

Perspectives and impact of social BPM – SMAU 2011

I also gave a short interview at the exhibition, which has been published on YouTube:

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

10 years of WebRatio (and 15 of WebML)

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

This is a quick visual summary of the event held at Villa Grumello, Como, Italy, on October 14th, 2011 for the celebration of the 10 years of WebRatio:

Further pictures of the event are available on the WebRatio blog. Some of the ideas I presented there are described in my previous post.
The presentation I gave at the 10-year event is available on SlideShare:

The WebML innovation cycle

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).