Model-Driven Approach for User Interface-Business Alignment

Kênia Sousa

Advisor: Jean Vanderdonckt

Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)Louvain School of Management (LSM)

Belgian Laboratory of Computer-Human Interaction (BCHI)

Motivations

• Widen viewpoint beyond IT-Business perspective.

• Changes on business processes that directly impact UIs are rarely considered in the literature.

• The industry has realized that it is no longer only system processing time or infra-structure that is pivotal to improve their services for customers.

• A study has shown that alignment with UI contributed to 100 to 200% user productivity gains (Henry, 2007).

IT-Business Alignment

• The CEO Framework represents an enterprise architecture that aligns the organization’s strategy with its business processes, IT software and hardware and people.

• No vision for UIs• Changes impacting on

UIs are not carefully handled

• How to address large systems with hundreds of UIs?

(Vasconcelos, 2001)

Model-Driven UID

• Vision for user interfaces, but not for user interaction: Alignment of BP with UIs with direct links between activities in processes to elements on the UIs.

• Absence of generic structure: Decomposition of a business process in layers done for specific scenarios.

• Scarcity in tool support for traceability: Frameworks with principles, but not tools to support decision making.

• Not enough concern with people: Focus on how the artifacts are linked, handled and maintained than on the people who use the enterprise systems.

Goals

• Enable fast adaptation to new business challenges considering business context and user perspective• Stronger relationship between business

processes and UIs• Predict impact analysis when changes are made

on business processes or on UIs• Support decision makers with strategic

information (impacted end-users, units, etc.)

Contribution

• The need to focus on user interaction has led us to innovate on aligning IT with business processes through UI models by originally calling the term UI-Business Alignment.

• UI-Business Alignment is a framework that brings forward the user perspective in the business context with a methodology and tool.

• It is appropriate for large organizations where there are hundreds of users, thousands UIs and heterogeneous systems.

Methodology

• Recognized as the best model to precisely represent how users interact with systems;

• It has a hierarchical structure that provides an overview of the user interaction;

• Its hierarchical structure has the same purpose of the business process structure: from high level to detailed description;

• The symmetry of both structures represents a clear bridge between business processes and UIs.

Why Task Models?

Traceability

• Rules are a form to represent general knowledge using formal symbols to represent a collection of propositions.

• Transformation rules: transform BPMN business processes in task models;

• Verification rules: check the coherence of the association of task models with UI components; and

• Change management rules: make an impact analysis of changes made on any of the models.

• We have defined 53 transformation rules; each of them has been explored for different operations, totalizing in 212 change management rules for forward engineering.

Transformation Rules

Business Model Task Model

Sequence Flow Enabling

Sequence Flow + Data Object Enabling + Information Passing

Rule Intermediate Event + Link Intermediate Event

Suspend/resume

Exclusive decision Deterministic choice

Inclusive decision + Exclusive merge Non-Deterministic choice

Cancel Intermediate Event Disabling

Ad-Hoc marker in sub-process Independence

Parallel gateway Concurrency

Parallel gateway + Data Object Concurrency + info passing

Verification Rules

• After associating tasks with screen components, check if the association is coherent.

• If the node is a screen group, then the node below it is screen group or screen;

• If the node is a screen and is the second to last level, then the node below it is screen element.

Task Model User Interface

Change Management Rules

• Forward Tracking

“If there is a task in the task model, and it does not have any screen element associated to it, then create a screen element for that new task”.

Change Management Rules

• Backward Tracking

“If there is a screen component in the UI, and it does not have tasks associated to it, then create a task sub-tasks in the task model for its screen fragment”.

Tool Support

• User-Centered: stakeholders visualize how the process is performed through user interfaces.

• Traceable: assist in identifying the impact of changes to maintain the alignment between BP and UIs.

• Human-Centered: cross-organizational engagement (making software engineers and users aware of changes).

• Optimization: users are a source of process optimization because the way they perform their activities directly impacts time, budget and resource allocation for process execution.

Advantages

Publications

• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J. A Model-Driven Approach to Align Business Processes with User Interfaces. International Journal of Universal Computer Science, Special issue on Human-Computer Interaction, Nov. 2008.

• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J. User Interface Development Lifecycle for Business-Driven Enterprise Applications. 7th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces CADUI’08, 2008.

• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J. Addressing the Impact of Business Process Changes on Software User Interfaces. Proc. of 3rd IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM 2008), 2008, pp. 11-20.

• Sousa, K., Mendonça, H., Vanderdonckt, J., Rogier, E., Vandermeulen, J. User Interface Derivation from Business Processes: A Model-Driven Approach for Organizational Engineering. Proc. of SAC’2008, ACM Press, NY, 2008, pp. 553-560.

Thank you!

http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi BCHI Labhttp://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi/members/kso/

http://www.programalban.orgProgram Alban

http://www.usixml.orgUI extensible Markup Language