Managing process customizability and customization: Model, language and process

Abstract

One of the fundamental ideas of services and service oriented architecture is the possibility to develop new applications by composing existing services into business processes. However, only little effort has been devoted so far to the problem of maintenance and customization of already composed processes. In the context of global service delivery, where process is delivered to clients, it is critical to have a possibility to customize the standardized reference process for each particular customer. Having a standardized delivery process yields many benefits: interchangeable delivery teams, enabling 24/7 operations, labor cost arbitrage, specialization of delivery teams, making knowledge shared between all customers, optimization of standardized processes by re-engineering and automation. In the paper we propose an approach, where reference process models are used explicitly in the process lifecycle, where customer-specific process instantiations are obtained by a series of customization steps over reference processes. To show the feasibility of the approach, we developed a process-independent language to express different customization options for the reference business processes. We also provided an implementation that extends WebSphere BPEL4WS Editor to introduce process customizations to BPEL4WS processes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.