CIMOSA - News
Editor: Martin Zelm, Gehenbuehlstr. 18A, D-70499 Stuttgart, martin.zelm@cimosa.de
The CIMOSA - News is published by the CIMOSA Association.
The CIMOSA News will report on CIMOSA applications, evolution of its technical
specification, advancements in standardisation and related items. Contributions
from other parties are welcome. The CIMOSA - News will be printed periodically
and is also available in the internet at http://www.cimosa.de.
Launching of the project will take place on January 12-14, 2004 in Bordeaux. Special emphasis is to be put on the collaboration and common methodologies with other NoE and IP projects in the Sixth Framework Programme.
The Object Management Group (OMG) held a Technical Meeting in London, England on 2003-11-17/21, (www.omg.org/) with 300 participants from all over the world, many from the US representing business users, technology vendors, industry, associations and system integrators. An exhibition with 20 exhibitors complemented the technical sessions. The OMG Technical Meetings are held every two months and structured in up to 120 task force workshops and plenary sessions in 10 parallel streams. Task forces address the development of upcoming industry standards via the RFP process and maintenance of legacy standards in the main fields: architectures & platforms, modelling, infrastructures, Web services and communication. Predominant examples are MDA, CORBA or UML
A rather new work group for business oriented enterprise modelling is the Business Enterprise Integration Domain Task Force (BEIDTF), under the convenor Fred Cummins, EDS. The BEIDTF meeting was attended by 40 participants with the objective to discuss a draft RFP titled ‘Architecture of Business Modelling’. The goal of the BEIDTF work is to design a roadmap for developing specifications to frame and structure the subject of business modelling. The OMG definition of a business model requires … business people to provide a sufficient understanding of the business that may be used in a variety of ways to solve business problems as perceived by business people, one of which is providing business requirements for information systems. Hence, one key objective of OMG Business Modelling is to bridge the gap between business and IT, to support model driven system development.
The overall structure of Business Modelling Meta-model is proposed as a layered approach. The upper layers could be provided by vendors of modelling techniques, industry groups or company wide semantic integration initiatives. The model contains six basic sub-concepts: Business Domain, Business Process, Location, Business Organisation and Business Motivation. A set of constructs is proposed and under discussion.
The Fourth Congress on Business Process Management, the
BPM4
, Munich, 2003-10-09/10, was attended by 180 participants. 33 papers addressed
concepts of Business Process Management (BPM), case studies, best practice
industry applications and recent trends in BPM products, solutions an technology.
Volkswagen reported on their experience with the (data) integrated purchasing
work places, called Business Activity Management, where all information
required is made available on a common Portal to enable decentralised decision
making. Parts of the continuous schedule tracking activities have been
automated and are executed by the system. In the IDS-Scheer presentation
a new understanding for continuous solutions with BPM was postulated, namely
to design control, integrate and optimise Enterprise processes with the
appropriate organisation and IT support. A comparative tool study with
application scenario based live testing of 10 BPM tools ranging from rather
simple scheduling tools to high level tools like the ARIS Collaboration
Suite. The study concluded that in addition to aspects of cost, modelling
purpose, functions and technology, the knowledge of people in a company
is crucial for a successful deployment of BPM. Presentations on standardisation
in BPM covered AOSIS and the UEML project. Further information can be found
at www.NewMediaSales.com .
PRO-VE’03, the 4th IFIP Working Conference on
Virtual Enterprises, Lugano, Switzerland, 2003-10-29/31, was attended by
about 100 people and 62 papers have been presented in two plenary and 18
parallel sessions. The plenary sessions addressed Trends in decentralised
innovation and The third wave of internet to allow collaborative
working environments. The parallel sessions addressed topics like research
challenges and roadmaps for advanced virtual organisations and collaborative
networks and their formation, ontologies, knowledge management, simulation
and decision making, enterprise and process models, multi-agent approaches,
supporting infrastructures, case studies and best practices. For more information:
L.M. Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh, (Eds.), Processes and Foundation
for Virtual Organisations, Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 1-4020-7638-X
The ISO TC184/SC5/WG1 meeting held in Paris, 2003-11-19/21
was attended by 12 people representing 6 countries: China, Germany, France,
New Zealand, UK, USA with the objective to review a proposal for the amendment
of ISO 15704 to include an economic model view and to resolve several SC5
resolutions. Three NPs have been discussed: 1) on Manufacturing-process
interoperability; 2) on (user) benefits of ISO 15704 and 19439; 3) on Process
modelling. The discussion resulted in a recommendation to integrate the
three NPs into the one on process modelling and to aim for a technical
report rather than a standard. The next WG1 meeting will be held in Paris,
2004-04-19/23, as part of the next SC5 meeting. Richard Martin, Tinwisle,
USA; is the new convenor of WG1 with the new web site
http://forums. nema.org/~iso_tc184_sc5_wg1, which contains new documents
and all documents from the former WG1 web site at NIST.
.
New Book
The Handbook on Enterprise Architecture , Bernus, P.; Nemes, L.; Schmidt, G. (Eds.) 2003, Series: International Handbooks on Information Systems, Springer Verlag, ISBN: 3-540-00343-6 . This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview on methods, tools and examples of how to architect an enterprise considering all life cycle aspects of Enterprise Entities (such as individual enterprises, enterprise networks, virtual enterprises, projects, and other complex systems including a mixture of automated and human processes). The main reference of the book is made to ISO15704:2000, and the GERAM Framework (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology) that generalises the requirements of Enterprise Reference Architectures. Various Architecture Frameworks (PERA, CIMOSA, GRAI-GIM, ARIS, Zachman, C4ISR/DoDAF) are presented in the context of GERAM especially with regard to the life cycle aspects to allow a deeper understanding of their contributions and their correct use. The handbook addresses a wide variety of audience from researchers to business / project managers, system designers, IT vendors / practitioners and consultants, offering methods and tools necessary to design or redesign enterprises, as well as to structure the implementation into manageable projects.
The CIMOSA Association (COA) is a non-profit organisation involved in promotion of Enterprise Engineering and Integration based on CIMOSA and its active support in national, European and international standardisation. COA members are industrial and research organisations.