business process reengineering and workflow automation: a technology transfer experience

Business process reengineering and workow automation:a technology transfer experience

Lerina Aversano, Gerardo Canfora *, Andrea De Lucia, Pierpaolo Gallucci

Faculty of Engineering, University of Sannio, Palazzo Bosco Lucarelli, Piazza Roma , 82100 Benevento, Italy

Received 8 November 2000; received in revised form 27 March 2001; accepted 14 May 2001

Abstract

In the last few years many public and private organizations have been changing the way of thinking their business processes to

improve the quality of delivered services while achieving better eciency and ecacy. This paper presents results and lessons learned

from an on-going technology-transfer research project aimed at introducing service and technology innovation within a peripheral

public administration while transferring enabling workow methodologies and technologies to local Small and Medium Enterprises

(SMEs). We discuss a process reverse engineering approach and its application in the technology transfer project. We also discuss an

approach for evaluation and assessment of workow technology and present a prototype implementation for a selected process of

the subject organization.

2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the fun-damental rethinking and radical redesign of businessprocesses to achieve dramatic improvements in critical,contemporary measures of performance, such as cost,quality, service and speed (Hammer and Champy,1993). In the last few years many organizations havebeen changing the way of thinking about their businessprocesses to keep competitive in the global market. Inparticular, Internet is emerging as a key enabling tech-nology for most BPR projects. Workow managementis another example of technology that enables processperformance improvement in a cooperative networkingenvironment (Georgakopoulos et al., 1995). A Work-ow Management System (WfMS) enables process au-tomation through the integration, the coordination, andthe communication of both human and automatic tasksof a business process (Workow Management Coali-tion, 1996). In addition, most WfMSs of the last gen-

eration are web based (Ames et al., 1996) and mucheort is being made towards workow interoperability;this is recognized as a key to e-commerce and processscalability, as it enables to move towards a virtual or-ganization model by remodeling both the organizationstructure and its processes, coordinating work betweendistributed groups of employees, and sharing work withbusiness partners (suppliers and customers) (WorkowManagement Coalition, 2000).

Public Administration (PA) is also sensible to BPR,as often the services it provides are critical for thebusiness of citizens and organizations. The terms busi-ness-to-administration and consumer-to-administrationhave been introduced in the e-commerce terminology torefer to activities that involve PAs. The driver for BPRin the PA can be of dierent types:

new legislation; new services; new technology.

Large scale redesign of processes involving one or morePA departments often requires new laws. However,service and technology innovation (that can be appliedwithin the existing laws) might signicantly improve theexisting processes and the way services are delivered to

The Journal of Systems and Software 63 (2002) 2944

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*Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-0824-305804; fax: +39-0824-

21866.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L. Aversano), can-

[email protected] (G. Canfora), [email protected] (A. De Lucia),

[email protected] (P. Gallucci).

0164-1212/01/$ - see front matter 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S0164-1212 (01 )00128-5

customers. For example, Internet, workow, and doc-ument management technologies can sensibly ease theproduction of documents (one of the main activities ofPA) and the way employees and customers manage andretrieve them.

In Italy, the eort to improve the quality of the publicservices delivered while reducing the associated costsculminated in 1993 in the creation of AIPA 1 (Autoritaaper lInformatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione)whose mission is to improve the delivery of public ser-vices through the best use of information technology. Toachieve this mission, AIPA is currently promoting thecreation of a national-wide open network and the de-nition of an associated cooperative architecture to allowthe integration of (new and existing) information sys-tems from dierent organizations (AIPA, 1995; Italiangovernment administration, 2000). At the same time, anumber of projects have been instantiated for simplifying,re-documenting, re-engineering, and migrating existingsoftware systems toward modern platforms (Canforaand Cimitile, 1997; Canfora et al., 1999; Cimitile, 1997).Indeed, reengineering business processes and introduc-ing new technologies within an organization also aectsexisting software systems. It has been estimated that theItalian PA currently own a software portfolio of morethan 230 millions lines of code associated with hundredsof information systems which support and automatemore than 250 processes over all the national territory(Canfora and Cimitile, 1997).

A major problem for enacting BPR in the Italian PAis the fact that the Italian legislation tends to be veryprescriptive with respect to the way administrativeprocesses are carried on, and this may drastically limitthe possibility for redesign. Very often, even simplechanges may require issuing a new law or modifying anexisting one. However, recently a major change in thebody of laws that regulate the PA has been introducedwith the aim of simplifying administrative processes,reducing the bureaucratic overhead, and easing the de-centralization of decision making activities and respon-sibilities (Italian parliament, 1997a,b, 1998). Moreover,PA departments can be authorized to experiment withchanges to the prescribed administrative processes withinpilot projects. As a consequence, AIPA and several PAdepartments are promoting and enacting pilot projectsfor the redesign of the administrative processes andthe introduction in the PA of workow technologiesto improve the delivery of public services, speed upthe decision making, devise new ways of deliveringpublic services and realizing new services (AIPA, 1997,1999).

Most of these projects only involve central PA de-partments (i.e. ministers) and there is a diculty to ex-

port this type of experiences to the peripheral PA. Oneof the key problems is the fact that the managers ofperipheral PA tend to adhere to the prescribed regula-tions and are rarely keen to make autonomous (andrisky) decisions. Therefore, new technology and servicesremain the major drivers for BPR in the peripheral PA.However, even the introduction of new technology canbe a challenge in depressed areas, where the main actorsof the Information and Communication Technology(ICT) market are local Small and Medium Enterprises(SMEs), because of two factors:

the incapacity of peripheral PA departments to qual-ify and structure their demand for ICT;

the diculty for the SMEs that operate with the pe-ripheral PA to devise and market services based onnew technologies.

In this paper we present early results and lessonslearned from an on-going technology-transfer researchproject, named LINK, aiming at:

introducing new technology and services within a pe-ripheral PA;

transferring enabling BPR methodologies and work-ow technologies to local SMEs.

In the rst case, the goal is to help peripheral PA de-partments to understand and structure their ICT needs,whereas in the latter case the goal is to make softwareanalysts of local SMEs able to move from traditionalsoftware development and maintenance to technologyanalysis, BPR, and organization and software systemintegration.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discussesthe context of the project LINK. Sections 3 and 4 discussissues related to process reverse engineering and work-ow technology evaluation and selection, respectively.Section 5 presents the prototype implementation. Re-lated work is reviewed in Section 6, while concludingremarks and lessons learned are outlined in Section 7.

2. LINK technology transfer projects

LINK is a consortium aiming at the development ofa collaboration network among Universities, researchcenters, SMEs, and PA. The partners of LINK arecarrying out a number of research projects in fourItalian areas, with the goal of territorial innovation andtechnology transfer. The Software Engineering ResearchGroup of the University of Sannio is involved in twoprojects aiming at the development and transfer to localSMEs of know-how in the form of models, methodol-ogies, and technologies to be transformed in a short timein the oer of modern software products and services1 http://www.aipa.it

30 L. Aversano et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 63 (2002) 2944

for the PA. Fig. 1 shows the technology transfer modelunderlying the LINK activities and projects in theSannio area. Research institutions have a twofold role:

stimulating the local ICT market of peripheral PA bypromoting and enacting pilot BPR projects driven bynew technology and services, thus helping PA depart-ments to understand, structure, and qualify theirneeds;

promoting and helping a network of local SMEs withan adequate background of methodological and tech-nological knowledge to provide answers to the emerg-ing needs for PA process innovation.

The main feedback for the research institutions fromthe project partners consists of:

stimuli for identifying and addressing new researchproblems;

assessment of the technology transfer methodology.

The bold arrows in Fig. 1 refer to the nal goal of thetechnology transfer experience.

We have identied in the workow management thekey area where the demand for advanced services isparticularly relevant. Two related intervention eldshave also been identied to take more advantage fromintroducing workow technologies:

document management, to enable managers, em-ployees, and citizens to retrieve the documents pro-duced, or views of them, in a exible way;

legacy software system migration, to enable their in-tegration within the workow platform.

One of the LINK projects in the Sannio area entailsthe direct participation of skilled software analysts andprogrammers of the industrial partners to experimentinnovative software products and services for the PA,while the other project is concerned with training activ-

ities on the same subjects. To start the projects, we haveconducted an economic and competence analysis of theSannio area (LINK, 2000) and identied and contacted anumber of software SMEs (all the contacted companieshad less than 25 employees). We have further analyzedthe six SMEs that joined the consortium, through visitsto their laboratories, interviews, and questionnaires. Theanalysis aimed at collocating the SMEs with respect totwo dimensions, as shown in Fig. 2:

the orientation to workow technology; the orientation to the PA market.

Two companies had a good degree of orientation toworkow technology, while two companies mainly de-veloped software for the PA. These SMEs joined boththe pilot experimental project and the training program,with the goal of moving to the ideal position. Not sur-prisingly, the remaining two companies did not considerthe goals of the projects strategic for their immediatefuture, but agreed to participate to the training pro-gram.

Two peripheral PA departments also joined theconsortium. One of them, namely the Province ofBenevento, agreed to participate in the pilot project withthe role of customer, while the other one was more in-terested in the training program.

To achieve the maximum involvement of the SMEsand the peripheral PA that joined the consortium weformed three dierent work teams. Each team wascomposed of researchers of the University of Sannio,analysts and/or programmers of the SMEs (with the roleof consultants and service/product developers) andmanagers and employees of the Province of Benevento(with the role of process owners and key users of thePA).

The goal of the rst team was the analysis of theorganization structure and the processes of the Provinceand the identication and modeling of a key process tobe automated in the pilot project. Reverse engineeringthe existing processes of an organization is the rst stepin any BPR intervention (Jacobson et al., 1995). Thistask is generally very critical and for this reason thisteam was composed of a small number of people. Inparticular, only two experienced analysts of the twoSMEs with a signicant market segment in the PA wereselected together with two Universitys researchers with

Fig. 1. LINK technology transfer model in the Sannio area.

Fig. 2. Classication of software SMEs.

L. Aversano et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 63 (2002) 2944 31

experience in process modeling and a manager of theProvince. This team has completed the assigned task:Section 3 discusses the process identied, and the set ofguidelines devised as a result of this experience.

The second team was composed of two Universitysresearchers, four analysts/programmers (one for eachSME participant), and two employees of the Province.The goal of this team was to evaluate workow man-agement technology and select the WfMS for the pilotproject. The activities of this team have also ended andthe results are reported in Section 4.

The third team was composed of a larger number ofresearchers and programmers and has implemented themodeled process using the selected workow platform.Documents are produced in XML (Prescod and Gold-farb, 2000) through the WfMS user interface. A docu-ment management system has been implemented andintegrated with the WfMS (Aversano et al., 2001b). Thesystem allows the retrieval of document views accordingto the needs of dierent users. Section 5 describes theprototype implementation.

The latter team is currently investigating the prob-lems related to the integration of the existing softwaresystems with the WfMS (Aversano et al., 2001c). Inparticular, a set of wrappers are being designed andimplemented to allow the WfMS to access the programsand databases relevant to the processes automated in thepilot project. This work is building upon results of ourprevious research projects on migration and wrapping ofPA information systems (Cimitile et al., 1999; Canforaet al., 1999; Aversano et al., 2001a).

3. Process reverse engineering in the PA

Reverse engineering administrative processes of aperipheral PA entails the interaction of business processanalysts that know BPR methodologies and technolo-gies with process owners and key users that have mainlyan administrative and juridical culture, deep knowledgeof the process and oce problems, but a poor organi-zation and technology knowledge. The risks to avoid areof two types:

analysts can make interpretation errors of a processthat only supercially know;

process owners and key users do not know how toformulate in a systematic way the process activitiesand their ows.

The goal of the process reverse engineering consists of:

developing a knowledge about the organization of thehuman resources in the oces;

pointing-out the role and the activities of human re-sources within the process.

This information is the starting point for abstractingan eective representation of the reverse engineeredprocess.

In our joint experience with analysts of the localSMEs and the personnel of the Province of Beneventowe have reverse engineered a key process of the technicaloce, namely the tender management process. Theprocess reverse engineering approach was iterative. Thereverse engineering team reverse engineered the processand produced a rst draft model. The production ofthe nal version required a number of revisions con-ducted with the help of other employees of the PA andanalysts of the SMEs. As a result of this activity we haveempirically derived some process reverse engineeringguidelines; these guidelines outline the process shownin Fig. 3.

UML (Booch et al., 1999) was chosen as processmodeling language: indeed, although most WfMS pro-vides a graphical process denition language, we decidedto adopt a higher level language to abstract from thedetails of specic languages and to make the processreverse engineering activity independent of the selectedworkow platform. Moreover, the technological trans-fer essence of the project suggested the selection of astandard, rather than the denition of a new modelinglanguage. The following sections discuss the reverseengineering guidelines and their application in the pilotproject.

3.1. Scope denition

An eective process denition may be achievedthrough a systematic identication of the elementaryprocess elements and a global synthetic description de-picting how these elements contribute to the process.The goal of this step is the identication of two keyelements:

Fig. 3. Process reverse engineering.


the context of the analyzed organization (or oce),i.e. the units it comprises and the other entities itinteracts with;

the products, i.e. the objects handled within the pro-cesses of the organization.

We analyzed the technical oce of the Province ofBenevento. This oce is composed of several units andinteracts with other oces of the Province (e.g. the ac-countancy oce), other PAs, rms, and citizens. Themain type of products consists of the documents devel-oped within dierent processes.

3.2. Process map

A process is a set of activities that transform an inputinto an output. We have adopted a description basedon dierent abstraction levels. The rst level refers tomacro-processes as perceived at the top level of the or-ganization. At this stage it is possible to identify anumber of key processes and decompose them into sub-processes, until the desired level of detail is achieved.

In our analysis we identied the tender managementprocess as the most important process of the technicaloce and decided to decompose it into sub-processes. Inparticular, at the rst level we identied three main sub-processes, namely, project planning, tender execution,and project execution, as shown in Fig. 4.

3.2.1. Process identicationA good method for identifying business processes has

been presented by Hammer and Champy (1993). Thismethod is based on the compilation of a table that as-sociates the process name with a short description aboutits initial and nal states (see Table 1).

Sample rules that can be applied are (Department ofDefense, 1994):

processes must be independent of the way the organi-zation is structured;

processes must be meaningful with respect to thegoals of the organization;

well-identied processes have a logical structure andcan be decomposed into the component elements;

redundant processes should be avoided.

3.2.2. Relations between processes and functional unitsOne of the main diculties in the identication of the

processes is related to the dierence between the processview and the functional unit view of the organization. Amatrix representation depicting the degree of involve-ment of the functional units within the processes canhelp in this case (see Table 2). Other matrices that couldbe constructed are processes versus data, processesversus information systems, organization strategies ver-sus processes, functional units versus data.

3.3. Unit identication

This step aims at identifying the functional units to beanalyzed using the process map and the supportingmatrices built in the previous step. Three main elementshave to be considered: organization aspects, informationow management, procedures, rules, and constraints.

We analyzed the functional units of the technicaloce according to their involvement in the tendermanagement process.

3.4. Approach selection

Next step is the selection of the approach for thecollection of process information. The alternatives are:

Observation. The observer does not take part to theprocess, but merely observes the execution of the oper-ations. His task consists of identifying and annotatingthe relevant features of the analyzed process.

Interview. This consists of an informal conversationbetween process analysts and the employees. The con-versation is based on a set of questions aiming at iden-tifying general aspects of the process.

Questionnaire. This investigation tool contains a listof questions about the process that are submitted toprocess owners and key users. The dierence with re-spect to the interview is the fact that in this case the listof questions is dened in a formal way and in a givenorder. Formulating eective questionnaires requires

Table 1

An example of process identication

Process Start and nal states

Project planning From design to approval

Tender execution From bid publication to bid assignment

Project execution From gone to try-out

Fig. 4. An example of process map.

Table 2

Processes versus functional units

Functional unit/

processes

Administrative

oce

Design

oce

Contract

oce

Tender management F H L

Process A L F

Process B P F H

FFundamental; HHigh involvement; LLow involvement.


most of the time the adoption of some specic guidelinesfor the analyzed environment.

In our experience all these investigation tools havebeenused: rst, observations of personnel work and interviewswere conducted with employees to get preliminary gen-eral information about the process; then question-naires were submitted to process owners and more expertemployees (key users) to recover process details.

3.5. Activity description

The goal of this step is the detailed description of theprocess from the information collected in the previousstep. Each process is described by the following ele-ments:

the set of activities and the relations (temporal, input/output, decisional) among them;

participants (people) and their roles; decisions and how they aect the ow of the activi-

ties; information involved/required by participants.

The information collected in the previous step cannow be organized in a structured document. In this stepthe process reverse engineering team can be re-sized. Inour case a reduced number of people was used to pro-duce the rst draft of the document, while a largernumber of people participated the document review.

3.6. Activity map

This step aims at producing the activity map, a semi-formal graphical model of the analyzed process. In ourcase we adopted UML (Booch et al., 1999) as modelinglanguage. In particular, activity diagrams have been

(a) (b)

(c)Fig. 5. Exemplar activity, use-case, and interaction diagrams.


used to model the ow of the process activities, includ-ing decisions and synchronizations; use-cases have beenadopted to model organizational aspects, i.e., whichactors (roles) participate to which use-case (activity orgroup of activity); nally, interaction (sequence andcollaboration) diagrams have been used to depict dy-namic aspects within a use case.

Fig. 5(a) shows an extract of the activity diagram ofthe project planning sub-process of the tender process;Fig. 5(b) shows a use-case fragment of the same sub-process; nally, Fig. 5(c) shows a sequence diagram ofthe use-case project supervision. The nal activity dia-gram contains 41 activities, while the use case modelcontains 15 use-cases and 12 actors.

3.7. Activity documentation

In this step the process model produced in the pre-vious step is completed with detailed documentation. Inparticular, the following documentation should be pro-duced:

Process documentation: name of the process, modelversion number, starting and ending conditions, securityand traceability control data.

Activity documentation: activity name and type, pre-condition, postcondition, other constraints.

Transition conditions: ow and execution conditions.Workow relevant data: name, availability and loca-

tion, role and functional unit of the producer.Used applications: type and name.In this phase a model of the information content,

structure and mutual relationships of the documentsinvolved in the workows is also produced. Modelingproceeds iteratively through the analysis of a set of se-lected sample documents with the following goals:

partitioning the documents into classes on the basisof the information content and the usage;

identifying the information content of each documentclass;

identifying the relationships existing between the doc-ument classes.

The result is a document-relationships model repre-sented through a UML class diagram, where nodesrepresent document classes and edges depict mutualrelationships. Fig. 6 shows an example of document-relationships model for the documents of the tendermanagement process.

In addition, a description of the dynamic behavior ofeach object document is produced in the form of UMLstate diagrams that species the dierent states of adocument instance during its life cycle and the actionsthat modify its content and attribute values.

4. WfMS evaluation

In this section we present the results of the evaluationof workow technologies performed to select the work-ow platform for the LINK pilot project. This evalua-tion was performed with a customized and simpliedversion of the DESMET method (Kitchenham, 1996).The method consists of two steps:

selection of the candidates; experimental assessment.

The rst step analyzes available documentation andrun product demos to identify a subset of the availableWfMS to pass to the experimental assessment step. Ex-perimentation consists of running the WfMS in con-trolled trials to comparatively assess their quality. Bothsteps exploit a quality model consisting of a set ofcharacteristics and related evaluation scales derived fromthe reference model of the Workow Management

Fig. 6. Exemplar document relationship diagram.


Table 3

Excerpt of product coordinates and functionality characteristics

I Product coordinates

Product identication Name WT-A WT-B WT-C WT-D

Version 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0

Producer

Distributor

Description

Platform Windows/NT YES YES YES YES

Other NO NO NO NO

Selection source Product demo YES YES YES YES

Articles NO NO YES YES

Product brochure YES NO YES YES

Specic experimental assess-

ment

YES NO NO NO

Use in real project YES NO NO NO

II Functionality Weights

Tool WT-A WT-B WT-C WT-D

1 Fundamental con-

structs available

1 Distributing 0.85 1 1 1 1

4 Comparing 0.85 1 0.75 0.75 0.75

5 Importing 0.85 1 1 0.25 0.25

2 Paths 1 Combination 0.85 1 1 1 1

2 Software elements 0.85 1 0 0 1

3 Data object handled 1 .html 0.15 YES YES NO NO

3 .xls 0.15 YES NO NO NO

4 .doc 0.15 YES NO NO NO

4 User interfaces 1 Graphic 0.85 1 1 1 1

2 Customization 0.85 1 0 0 0

7 Process 1 Static 0.85 YES YES YES YES

2 Dynamic 0.85 NO NO YES NO

Table 4

Excerpt of organization structure and workow, workow design, and target platform compliance characteristics

III Organization structure and workow Weights WT-A WT-B WT-C WT-D

1 Organization and

applications

1 Separate 0.85 1 0 0 0

2 Elements available 2 Role 0.85 YES YES NO NO

3 Group 0.85 YES YES NO NO

3 Workow controller

for

1 Flow sort 0.85 1 0 0 0

2 Exception handler 0.85 1 0 0 0

5 Statistic 0.85 1 0 0 1

6 Events evaluation 0.85 1 0 0 0

9 Productivity report 0.85 1 0 0 1

IV Workow design

1 Modeling types 2 Decision driven 0.85 YES NO NO NO

3 Event driven 0.85 YES NO NO NO

4 Development envi-

ronment

4 Existing applications reuse 0.85 1 1 0.75 0.75

5 System objects personalize 0.85 1 0 0.25 0.25

6 Integration of legacy

applications

0.85 1 1 0 0

5 Simulation 1 Workow analysis

components

0.15 1 0 0 0

V Target platform compliance

2 Compatibility with DBMS ODBC

complaint

0.85 YES YES NO NO


Coalition (1994). The nal score of each WfMS is ob-tained by a weighted average of the characteristic mea-sures.

The selection steps involved four dierent systems(for the sake of condentiality we will call them WT-A,WT-B, WT-C and WT-D) and two of these were se-lected for the experimental assessment.

4.1. Selection of the candidates

This step used 77 characteristics belonging to thefollowing ve categories:

product coordinates, which identify the WfMS, theversion under analysis, the producer, the runningoperating systems and machines, etc.;

functionality, which refers to the WfMS functions,the data objects handled and the related facilities, theuser-interface, the capability to dynamically change aprocess or its components during enactment, theprimitives to bind human resources to workload, etc.;

organization structure and workow, including thefeatures to model the organization, the roles, people,and groups, the mechanisms to associate organiza-tion elements with computing resources, the featuresto monitor and control running processes, etc.;

workow design, which includes the process model-ing approach (i.e. address/message driven, decisiondriven, event driven), the availability of graphicallanguages and editors, the support for simulation,etc.;

compatibility, which refers to the capability of inter-acting (and the degree of integration) with other toolsin use in the target environment.

Two dierent scales were used:

Yes/No, (1/0) to establish whether or not a givencharacteristic is present in a WfMS;

quantitative, in particular on ve values (0 no sup-port; 0.25 marginal support; 0.50 medium sup-port; 0.75 good support; 1 excellent support).

Table 5

Excerpt of the trial specication table

Class Category Trials Code Note

Installation Installation type Local installation IN1 Installation space and time

Friendly installation Product installation IN3 Indicate a level of installation diculty;

indicate the existence of user information

for installation; indicate the existence of

a typical installation

User installation Paradigm All functionality available

for the user

IU1 Indicate all the available functionality for

a customized installation

Conguration Interfaces Interface customization CF1 Indicate all customization elements

(e.g., color, font)

Environment Environment customization CF2 Indicate all customization environment

elements (e.g., Work directory)

User User proling CF3 User prole denitionEditor Coverage Create an example of all

the documents used in the

workow (e.g. use cases,

interaction diagram) with

available editors

ED1 Indicate the document representations:(a) complete and correct; (b) partial

Usability Create and manage a

document with any editor

ED3 Indicate the usability level of the editorsand the absence of fundamental

functionalities

Process Process logic Dene a process with

his actors, documents,

actions, conditions, and

check run time execution

PR1 Indicate the level of system management

of the process roles

Task Verify automatic task of

process

PR2 Indicate all tasks that can be automated

Project instance Dene more instance of

the same project

PR3 Verify the execution of some instances of

a process; verify the activation of

dierent process

Human resource Assign tasks and human

resources

PR4 Indicate assignment type: automatic,

role, user request, etc

Process management Process monitoring PR6 Check metrics gathering, deadline control,

and dynamic assignment of resources


The characteristic weights to compute the nal scorewere: 0.15 scarcely relevant; 0.85 very relevant. Anexcerpt of the quality model and the results obtained isshown in Tables 3 and 4. The scores of the dierentcharacteristics were the result of a group consensus(Boehm, 1981). The nal scores for three WfMS ana-lyzed were very similar (WT-B 0.321; WT-C 0.285;WT-D 0.304) and only WT-A had a signicantly dif-ferent score (WT-A 0.507).

For the two best products, WT-A and WT-B, allfundamental functional characteristics are well sup-ported (see Table 3); the main dierences between thesetwo WfMS are concerned with the languages they adoptfor organization and process modeling (see Table 4).Both WT-A and WT-B enables the denition of orga-nization elements, but only the rst tool provides fea-tures for ow stability, workload distribution, statistics,and performance reports. Also, WT-A and WT-B havea graphical user interface, but only WT-A allows usercustomization. Another important dierence concernsthe data objects handled (see Table 3): WT-A is com-pletely compliant with many widely used oce auto-mation environments.

As a result of this step, the WfMS WT-A andWT-B were short-listed for the experimental assessmentstep.

4.2. Experimental assessment

The activities in this step required acquiring the fullversions of the WfMS to experiment with; preliminarilyto the experimental trials, the team of experimentersparticipated in a training program delivered by person-nel of the WT-A and WT-B Italian importers.

The experimental trials concerned the implementa-tion of selected fragments of the reverse engineeredprocess. Because this model was expressed in UML, theexperimenter team also participated in a short trainingprogram on UML, designed and delivered by the Uni-versity of Sannio.

The experimental activities to perform and the resultsto collect were specied in two tables:

a trial specication table, which denes the trials toperform and the characteristics to evaluate. Examplesof trials include installation, customization, modelediting, simulation, monitoring, etc. (see Table 5 foran excerpt);

a result table, which collects and organizes the resultsof the trials for a particular product and experi-menter. Each table contains the product coordinates,the name of the experimenter, and a row for each ex-perimental trial, with the trial code, a comment of theexperimenter, the quantitative result expressed on ave values scale (see Table 6).

In particular, we collected twelve result tables, 6 foreach product. In fact, only the two University experi-menters and the four SMEs analysts/programmers wereasked to ll in the tables, whereas the two key usersacted as observers. The scores in each table were aver-aged to obtain an overall score for each WfMS and eachexperimenter; we did not need to perform additionalaveraging as all the overall scores of the six experi-menters clearly indicated the superiority of WT-A,namely the Ultimus Workow suite, 2 which was there-fore selected as the platform for the LINK pilot project.The main characteristics indicating the superiority of theUltimus suite are friendly graphic user interface, orga-nization and modeling design tools, simulation andcontrol tools. The results for the trials related to thosecharacteristics are shown in Tables 7 and 8 for the twoWfMS, respectively.

5. Prototype implementation

Coherently with the results of the technology selectionstep, the Ultimus Workow suite has been used to im-plement the prototype for the tender management pro-cess at the Province of Benevento. UltimusWorkow is aWeb-based Client/Server WfMS running on MicrosoftWindows NT. Two main components of the suite are theUltimus Workow Server, which controls the executionof the workow processes, and the Ultimus Designer,which provides an Integrated Development Environ-ment to graphically design new processes and decomposethem into sub-processes. The dierent components of theUltimus Workow suite communicate through an in-ternal open database that enables interoperability withexternal applications. External applications can also beincluded in the process model as automatic steps, namedowbots. The Ultimus suite provides obots for widelyused oce automation environments, ODBCDatabases,E-Mail servers, and le servers. In addition, it is possibleto develop custom obots.

The prototype implementation has been conducted atthree dierent levels:

Table 6

Experimental assessment result table

Product name

Version

Producer

Setting

Experimenter

Code Experimenter comment Score

Code 1 Code 1 Comment

. . .Code n Code n Comment

2 http://www.ultimus1.com


process level; document level; legacy integration level.

At the process level we translated the UML processmodel of the analyzed process into a graphical modelbased on the Ultimus graphical primitives for processdenition. Fig. 7 shows two components of the work-ow model produced with Ultimus Designer for theanalyzed process. The workow model in Fig. 7(a) in-cludes human or interactive steps, sub-process steps, andautomatic steps (external applications). The workowmodel in Fig. 7(b) corresponds to one of the sub-pro-cesses in Fig. 7(a) and also includes an automatic stepfor the production of an MS-Word document.

At the document level we have used the UML doc-ument models to dene Document Type Denitions(DTDs) and enable the production of the administrativedocuments in XML format (Prescod and Goldfarb,2000), in addition to standard oce automation formatssuch as MS-Word. The UML document model and the

DTD are also used to produce a form-based user in-terface for the creation and modication of the docu-ment through a web browser. The user interface hasbeen implemented using the facilities of the Ultimusdesigner and VBScript. Scripting functions are used toautomatically generate XML documents from the valuescontained in the HTML forms and to load the XMLdocuments into the user interface for document evolu-tion. We have used the Microsoft DOM interface(Sturm, 2000) to deal with XML documents. In partic-ular, DOM primitives have been accessed throughVBscripts executed by an Ultimus automatic step.

Storing documents in XML format facilitates theirretrieval using a context-sensitive document manage-ment system. We have developed and integrated in theworkow platform an XML-based document manage-ment system, named GIANO (Aversano et al., 2001b),that provides:

a context sensitive querying mechanism to achievehigh levels of recall and precision (Baetza-Yates and

Table 7

WT-A average (partial)

Product name Workow tool A

Code Comment Score

IN1 20 min 100 MB X X X X X

IN3 No diculty X X X X X

IU1 Windows NT compliant X X X X X

CF1 Font and color X X X X X

CF2 Folders X X X X X

CF3 Yes X X X X X

ED1 UML Like X X X X

ED3 Documents design and handling X X X

PR1 High usability X X X X X

PR2 Dierent documents X X X X

PR3 Administrator X X X X X

PR4 Assignment of roles and task to

users, workload distribution

X X X X X

PR6 Time and cost management X X X X X

Table 8

WT-B average (partial)

Product name Workow tool B

Code Comment Score

IN1 20 min 100 MB X X X X X

IN3 No diculty X X X X X

IU1 Domino lotus compliant X X X X X

CF1 Font and color X

CF2 Folders X

CF3 Yes X X X X X

ED1 Proprietary model X X

ED3 Documents design and handling X X

PR1 Low usability X

PR2 Dierent documents X

PR3 Administrator X X X

PR4 Assignment of roles and task to users X X X

PR6 Hard management X X


Ribero-Neto, 1999); for example, one may want toretrieve only documents having a given keyword ina specic document part and neglect documents in-cluding that keyword in dierent parts;

dierent views of the retrieved documents for dierentusers; for example dierent administrative employeesneed to access dierent parts of administrative docu-ments and also dierent views have to be providedto the citizens the information retrieval service isdirected.

Currently, we are integrating the legacy systems ofthe PA department related with the tender managementprocess within the workow prototype. First, we areperforming an analysis of the legacy systems to assesstheir quality and decomposition level, according to thesuggestions of Brodie and Stonebaker (1995). We planto apply an incremental migration strategy, as describedby Canfora et al. (1999). Currently, the identication of

the client component (user interface) and server com-ponent (application logic and database) is being per-formed by applying the slicing algorithms presented byCanfora et al. (2000), while the integration with the webinfrastructure is being achieved through wrappers real-ized as Dynamic Load Libraries (Aversano et al.,2001a). The nal migration step of the adopted strategywill be the conversion of the server part of the legacysystem to an object-oriented architecture, by using anapproach that optimizes selected design metrics (Cimi-tile et al., 1999).

6. Related work

Transferring innovative technologies and tools topractitioners, and particularly to SMEs, has long beeninvestigated in many areas within the business commu-nity. As far as the specic area of software technology is

(a)

(b)

Fig. 7. Workow models: higher-level process (a) and sub-process (b).


concerned, Raghavan and Chand (1989) give a compre-hensive review of technology transfer methods. Redwineand Riddle (1985) report that the time needed for asoftware technology to mature to the point that it can bediused to practitioners ranges between 15 and 20 years.Of course, this is a too long time to wait in a market, suchas software, where reduced time-to-market is a key tokeep competitive (Peeger and Menezes, 2000). A con-sequence is that innovative technologies are often adop-ted well before a clear evidence of their advantagesemerges. The LINK technology transfer approach triesto overcome these diculties through pilot projects inwhich researchers, practitioners and users assess inno-vative technologies and tools with the aim of identifyingthe technology solutions ready to be transferred to par-ticular territorial areas and market segments. In doingthat, we seek the active participation of innovators andearly adopters (Rogers, 1995). However, we did not ndinnovators and early adopters with a signicant presencein the PA market, as many actors of this market segmenttend to be early or even latemajority adopters (see Fig. 2).

Peeger and Menezes (2000) suggest the need forbuilding a technology transfer model to gain a betterunderstanding of how technology adoption works inindividual organizations. Usually, such a model entailsan evaluation performed by a rst-time user of thetechnology to see if it solves the problem it addresses.This is also the main focus of our pilot projects; on onehand we design the evaluation experiments and on theother hand we help the evaluators to perform them andinterpret the results.

Kitchenham et al. (1995) dene guidelines for orga-nizing and analyzing case studies. In particular, sevensteps are dened: hypothesis denition, pilot project se-lection, comparison method identication, confoundingfactors eect minimization, case study planning, casestudy monitoring, and results analysis and report. Theway our experience is being conducted has many analo-gies with these guidelines. In particular, the hypothesis ofthe project LINK was that territorial and technologicalinnovation could be achieved by identifying innovativeproducts and services and creating a partnership betweenpotential producers (software SMEs) and customers (thePA) of these products and services. Our evaluation andcomparison method is based on DESMET (Kitchenham,1996); it adopts two steps (pre-selection and assessment)and denes clear experimental guidelines to minimize theeects of confounding factors.

A similar approach has been adopted by Cantone(2000). His evaluation method is based on more steps:the advantage is a greater precision in the producedresults; however, it is also more costly and less practicalto be adopted by SMEs. Cantone also aims at trans-ferring innovative workow technology to the PA andclaims that innovators (in his case the users of thetechnology) are required to the success of the technology

transfer project. In Cantones study the user was a cen-tral administrative organization, with a high technolog-ical level. We also agree that innovators are required, butthe technological level of local PA departments is lowerand then the project LINK innovators are selectedamong potential producers of products and servicesbased on workow technologies.

A point of interest of our experience concerns processreverse engineering and modeling. Dierent approachesto process and workow modeling have been proposedin the literature (Winograd and Flores, 1986; Jacobsonet al., 1995; Workow Management Coalition, 1999). Alanguage for workow denition and modeling has alsobeen dened in the WIDE (Workow in IntelligentDistributed database Environment) project (Casati et al.,1995). The proposed model was structured in three dif-ferent representations, namely Organization model, In-formation model, and Process model that describe thedierent views in the workow execution. Similarly, theActivity Behavior Specication model aims at integrat-ing organization and workow modeling (Buler andJablonski, 1994). The same aspects are considered alsoin Action Port Model (APM) (Carlsen, 1998), a modeloriented to the denition of dynamic workow througha set of constructs that allow the modication of theprocess at execution time.

Our approach is dierent: we did not introduce anew workow modeling language, but used a standard,namely UML, to ease the technology transfer to theSMEs. UML has been used as a process and workowmodeling language also in (Loops and Allweyer, 1998;Cantone, 2000). In particular, Loops and Allweyer(1998) show how a suitable workow model can beachieved through the joint use of dierent UML dia-grams (activity diagrams, use-case diagrams, and inter-action diagrams), although some lacks are pointed out.In our opinion, a reasonable high-level workow modelcan be produced using UML diagrams, and renedusing the specic process denition language constructsof the selected WfMS.

The results of our experience also demonstrate thevalidity of UML from the technology transfer point ofview. SMEs personnel without any knowledge of UMLand process reverse engineering were able to learn anduse the language in a short time. Even process ownersand key users of the PA, that have mainly a juridical andadministrative background and a scarce technologicalknowledge, were able to understand the process modeldrafts, providing a valuable help in the review phase.

7. Concluding remarks

In this paper we have presented results of an on goingproject of technology transfer to software SMEs in theSannio area. Driven by the directives and the initiatives


of the AIPA for BPR and technology innovation in theItalian central PA (AIPA, 1997, 1999), the local PA hasbeen identied as the major potential customer of in-novative ICT in the Sannio area. Workow and docu-ment management have been identied as the enablingtechnology for BPR in the PA and have been chosen asthe focus of the technology transfer program.

One of the results of our project was that the localSMEs improved the way to approach the local PA andagreed on the need for a well-dened and practicalmethod to reverse engineer and understand adminis-trative processes. This is a prerequisite for moving fromthe automation of single process activities, throughtraditional information systems, to the overall manage-ment and improvement of the processes, through theintegration of dierent software technologies. Indeed,most of the lessons learned from our experience concernthe process reverse engineering phase that is an expen-sive and critical phase of a BPR project:

Accurately select process owners and key users. It isimportant to carefully select the process owners andthe key users to include in a process reverse engineer-ing team. In addition to knowledge of the processand its components, motivation and commitment arekey characteristics to seek. In our experience, PA per-sonnel tend to interpret the investigation as a way tocontrol their activities and productivity, and aretherefore reluctant to provide insight information.Even the most motivated people are very keen ofimproving and facilitating the existing processesthrough the introduction of innovative technology,but they tend to oppose to meaningful changes ofthe processes and workows. This is partially dueto the fact that they see in changing the processes acritique to their way of working and a risk of dimin-ishing their knowledge and consequently their power.

Listen to process owners and key users. The reverse en-gineering team should allow for ample negotiationwith the process owners and key users. In our experi-ence we learned that listening to participants in a pro-cess is a key to the success of a reverse engineeringproject. It is important not making pressure on thepeople interviewed to get quickly the desired answers;analysts should ease answers to emerge spontane-ously from the discussion.

Use multiple data gathering approaches. The selectionof the data gathering approach should take into ac-count the type and amount of information alreadyavailable (e.g., operation procedures, rules qualitymanuals) and the willingness to cooperate of the pro-cess owners and key users (for example, an interviewmay require much more participation than just llinga questionnaire o-line).

Draw early drafts of process maps. It is advisable tostart drawing down the activity map as soon as the

information gathered make it possible and submitthe draft to process owners and key users for revision.In our experience, it was valuable to revise the draftswith additional analysts that had not taken part in thedrawing of the activity map. The feedback receivedwas very helpful to early detect and correct errors,omissions, and misunderstandings;

Use a standard process modeling language. The use ofa standardized high-level process modeling languageindependent of any workow platform is a key forexibility. In our experience, SMEs have particularlyappreciated this approach, as it allowed them to ac-quire methodological and technological knowledgewithout having to commit to any particular vendor.

Concerning the technology evaluation and adoptionthe following lessons can be outlined:

Delay the technology evaluation activity with respect tothe process reverse engineering. In our project weadopted a well-dened workow technology evalua-tion model derived from the literature (Kitchenham,1996) and customized by considering the referencemodel of theWorkowManagementCoalition (1994).This allowed a clear assessment of market technolo-gies and the selection of the WfMS could be basedon its adequacy to the target environment (the Prov-ince of Benevento) and its overall characteristics,rather than on the mere usability of the process de-nition language. This has also been possible becausethe use of a standard process modeling language en-abled the delay of the experimental assessment phaseof the technology evaluation activity. Indeed, in thisphase we could design the trials based on the draftof the activity map produced by the reverse engineer-ing team.

Take into account the industrial partners and the targetenvironment. The selection of a WfMS has been con-ducted by also taking into account the technology plat-forms already used by personnel of the SMEs and thePA involved in the project. On one side, the program-mers of the SMEs quickly learned to use the tools in-cluded in the workow development suite and tointegrate them with previously used technologies andprogramming languages. On the other side, the train-ing of PA personnel involved in the project (key usersand process owners) also required a little eort.

At the state of the art, the prototype has not yet beenintroduced in the working environment, as work is stillin progress to integrate it with the existing softwaresystems. However, process owners and key users thatexperimentally used the workow prototype agree thatthe introduction of workow and document manage-ment technologies in the working environment willimprove the productivity and the delivered services.


A nal consideration that we can derive from ourexperience concerns the degree of participation of thepersonnel of SMEs partners of the project. We noticedthat SMEs with a higher technological orientation tendto be more active than SMEs with a signicant marketsegment in the PA. Indeed, our ndings conrm thatinnovators and early adopters trust the evidence builtjointly with researchers, whereas early and late majorityadopters will wait for business evidence (Peeger andMenezes, 2000). This suggests that territorial and tech-nology innovation is driven more often by a companysattitude to be innovator or early adopter, rather than bya real market push. This is particularly true for theItalian peripheral PA market, which is characterized bya tendency to conform to innovations dictated by thecentral PA and AIPA, rather than to promote them.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the partners ofthe project LINK and in particular the Province ofBenevento, and the SMEs Alphasoft srl, Snap srl, Peo-ples Network srl, and Techcon srl. A special thankgoes to Aniello Cimitile for his contribution to theproject LINK and his comments on a draft of thismanuscript.

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Lerina Aversano received the Laurea degree in Computer Engineeringfrom the University of Sannio, Italy, in 2000. She is currently a PhDstudent at the University of Sannio. Her research interests includeprocess and information system modelling, workow management,document management, software reengineering and migration.

Gerardo Canfora received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineeringfrom the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, in 1989. He iscurrently an associate professor of Computer Science at the Faculty ofEngineering of the University of Sannio in Benevento, Italy. From1990 to 1991 he was with the Italian National Research Council(CNR). During 1992 he was at the Department of Informatica eSistemistica of the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. From1992 to 1993 he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for SoftwareMaintenance of the University of Durham, UK. Since 1993 he joinedthe Faculty of Engineering of the University of Sannio in Benevento,Italy. He has served on the program committees of a number of in-ternational conferences; he was program co-chair of the 1997 Inter-national Workshop on Program Comprehension and of the 2001International Conference on Software Maintenance. His research in-terests include software maintenance, program comprehension, reverseengineering, reuse, reengineering, migration, workow management,and document management.

Andrea De Lucia received the Laurea degree in Computer Science fromthe University of Salerno, Italy, in 1991, the M.Sc. degree in ComputerScience from the University of Durham, UK, in 1995, and the Ph.D.degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from theUniversity of Naples Federico II, Italy, in 1996. He is currently anassociate professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Engineeringof the University of Sannio in Benevento, Italy. Previously, he waswith the Department of Informatica e Applicazioni of the Universityof Salerno, Italy, and with the Department of Informatica e Siste-mistica of the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. From 1994to 1995 he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for SoftwareMaintenance of the University of Durham, UK. Since 1996 he joinedthe Faculty of Engineering of the University of Sannio in Benevento,Italy. He serves in the program and organising committees of severalinternational conferences and was program co-chair of the 2001 In-ternational Workshop on Program Comprehension. His researchinterests include software maintenance, reverse engineering, reuse, re-engineering, migration, program comprehension, workow manage-ment, document management, and visual languages.

Pierpaolo Gallucci received the Laurea degree in Computer Engineer-ing from the University of Sannio, Italy, in 2000. He is currently aresearcher at the University of Sannio. His research interests includeprocess and information system modelling, business process reengi-neering, workow management, document management, and webengineering.


Business process reengineering and workflow automation: a technology transfer experienceIntroductionLINK technology transfer projectsProcess reverse engineering in the PAScope definitionProcess mapProcess identificationRelations between processes and functional units

Unit identificationApproach selectionActivity descriptionActivity mapActivity documentation

WfMS evaluationSelection of the candidatesExperimental assessment

Prototype implementationRelated workConcluding remarksAcknowledgementsReferences