=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Technology Representation in i* Modules
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-766/paper14.pdf
|volume=Vol-766
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/istar/MoralesFMEP11
}}
==Technology Representation in i* Modules==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-766/paper14.pdf
CEUR Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011)
Technology Representation in i* Modules
Eliel Morales1, Xavier Franch2, Alicia Martínez1, Hugo Estrada1, and Oscar Pastor3
1
Centro Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico, Computer Science
Department, Cuernavaca, México
{eliel, amartinez, hestrada}@cenidet.edu.mx
2 GESSI Research Group, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
franch@essi.upc.edu
3 Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain
opastor@dsic.upv.es
Abstract. In current business practice an integrated approach to represent at the
design level the technological infrastructure that gives support to business pro-
cesses is needed. We argue that it is highly complex considering technology in
terms of specific functionalities from the beginning because these functionali-
ties depend on new business requirements produced continually by internal and
external changes. However, business-technology integration has been largely
neglected in the modeling of business processes, including i* models, consider-
ing the technological components as highly abstract entities that do not require
further description. In this paper, an overview of our approach to deal with
technology representation in i* business process models is presented, which fo-
cuses on the identification of quality attributes that are offered by specific tech-
nologies and the representation of these technologies using a particular class of
i* module. This approach has been explored in a previous work developing an
example of a library in which an automatic identification technology is required
to support some specific business processes.
Keywords: i* framework, iStar, i* modules, technology modeling, business
processes, business services
1 Introduction
Nowadays, the use of technology is an important aspect for the implementation of
efficient business processes, being the indispensable infrastructure for exchanging and
persisting information among business actors. In this context, technology can improve
the performance of business processes insofar as it is correctly adapted to the
organizational context. However, the integration of business and technology at the
design level is a current issue that applies both to general software solutions (like ERP
systems) and technological infrastructures, such as Radio Frequency IDentification
(RFID) or mobile technologies.
We consider that modeling business-technology integration is needed in software
and business process design, because embedding technology in the organization can
modify the workflow of business processes, and thus the manner in which the analysts
should design the software system. However, one issue we found at developing such
an integrated modeling technique, is the high complexity of considering technologies
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CEUR Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011)
in terms of specific functionalities from the beginning. This is mainly because the
number of functionalities and characteristics of technology to be handled can be very
high, and the business requirements to which technology should provide support are
continually modified by internal and external factors. A natural approach for
overcoming this complexity is to rely on goals in the early stages of business and
technology infrastructure design, rather than on detailed requirements, functionalities
or quality models. We argue that because of its intentional nature, the i* framework is
suitable to be used as a basis for such approach, enabling the analysts to incorporate
technological components in the definition of business processes, in order to better
consider the possibilities to incorporate the technology at design level. Therefore, we
propose a new business model that extends the capabilities of the service-oriented
approach for the i* framework defined in [1], considering technologies as a key
element for effective operation of the organization and representing them within i*
modules [2], in order to provide a framework for analysis and design of strategies for
integrating business and technology.
The proposed business model deals with technology in a more natural and
convenient manner considering technology directly in relation to business
requirements independently of their functional capabilities, by means of specifying its
quality attributes. We applied this approach in a previous work to a library example
[3], in which technology for the automatic identification of items (e.g., books) was
required to support specific business processes.
2 Objective of the Research
The goal of this paper is to present an i*-based approach for analysis and design of
business processes, considering technology representation as a key modeling aspect
of business process models. To achieve it, on one hand our work applies a service-
oriented approach as a strategy for managing the complexity and size of i* business
process models [1], the intention for doing this is only to isolate each business process
in order to focus on how a given technology may be applied to it, and to analyze
contributions and dependencies that are generated when integrating the technology
within a business process. On the other hand, our work uses a modular approach for
describing technological entities in i* modules [2], in terms of quality attributes
offered, and conditions of operational environment required by technology
functioning.
3 Scientific Contribution
The main contributions of our approach are: First, the definition of a framework for
technology integration analysis and design based on its quality attributes. This
framework describes how to model differentiation, compositional, refinement, and
integration features of technology. And second, the integration of two approaches
(services and modules) for incorporating modularity capabilities into i* business
process models at architectural and detailed modeling levels. In brief, we utilize an i*
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CEUR Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011)
service-oriented approach for modeling the global business architecture, and low level
i* modules for encapsulating the technology specification. Due to space limitations,
in this paper we only focus on the first contribution, particularly on the specification
of technologies using i* modules; the reader is referred to our previous works to know
the details of this approach.
Our approach include four types of information to specify technology to be
included in business process models: a) differentiation features, which include
information that makes a technology different from others and may serve to assess the
usefulness of the technology in the organizational context; b) compositional features,
which refer to the several components that a particular technology may be composed
of; c) refinement features, which enable us to deal with the varieties of a given
technology, derived from features of specific components of that technology; and d)
integration features, which enable us to be aware of the requirements that technology
is claiming and satisfying in regard to specific business processes. It is important to
point out that this paper only focuses on the representation of technological aspects at
the design level, and it does not present details about the development method
associated to the framework.
The information describing a particular technology is modeled in a technology
module. This allows us to create a portfolio of technologies which could be reused in
several organizations according to their necessity. Therefore, our approach consists of
defining which elements of the i* metamodel are to be included in this type of
modules to consider the features stated above. We use the i* metamodel proposed in
[2], which includes some classes for representing modules in a separate package from
the i* core metamodel (those classes represent the elements to be considered in the
module definition), as described in [3]: a) a set of properties for representing quality
attributes associated to quality characteristics of technology (e. g., efficiency,
usability), covering differentiation features; b) a network of actors (named technology
actors) connected by means of is-part-of and is-a links, which represents a technology
and its basic internal components, covering compositional and refinement features; c)
a set of one-side incoming dependencies, or dependencies without depender, entering
into technology actors, which specify the functionalities, resources and behavior that
the organization could obtain when using this technology (in particular, for those
dependencies whose dependum is a softgoal, there must be a relationship among the
softgoal and the quality attributes and their values, e.g. , a softgoal information be
encrypted may correspond to the quality attribute encryption algorithm with value
MD5); and d) a set of one-side outgoing dependencies, or dependencies without
dependee, stemming from technology actors, which represent relevant external
conditions required for the proper functioning of technology. Dimensions c) and d) of
technology representation together are for covering integration features.
To sistematize the process of identifying the information to be included in a
technology module with regard to differentiation and composition, the first step is to
build a quality model as proposed in [4], which specify a hierarchy of technology
characteristics, subcharacteristics, attributes and metrics. Some of this information
wont be shown graphically, but will remain as the source of a technology module
representation. Fig. 1 shows an example of a technology module for a RFID system,
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CEUR Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011)
Fig. 1. Technology module of a generic RFID system.
annotated with the main quality characteristics specified in the quality model (not
shown here) of this technology (functionality, usability, and efficiency) and
specifying its quality attributes (-, -) and main components ( and ).
Although in the graphical model is only shown limited information, in the quality
model we specified more detailed information, such as the metrics upon which rests
the statement of quality attributes. For example, for the attribute stated in softgoal
we idenfied two metrics on which it depends: speed of the tag response and
maximum write/read distance of reader. It is convenient that the information to be
specified in a technology module and in its underlying quality model is defined with
the assistance of an expert, in order to identify the relevant general features and
components of a technology, avoid to fail in excessive details or in the lack of
meaningful information, and reduce the time required for the description of
technology.
In relation to refinement, the second step is to define concrete types of technology
to be effectively used in organizations. This is done by extending the base technology
module into new modules that include new components and dependencies. For
example, to specify a passive RFID, we can refine the general RFID technology
module by adding it more specific features of passive tags. Fig. 2 depicts the
technology module of a passive RFID system, to which we have added two new
features: efficient coverage in short area range ( ), and reliable functioning in
interference environment ( ). Elements (actors and links) from the base module
within the refined ones appear in dotted lines as proposed in [5]. It is important to
point out that defining more concrete types of technology involves the refinement of
the initial quality model into new quality models, by adding new attributes or
discarding some of the existent ones; for example, to the attribute of the active
RFID system (Fig. 2) corresponds the addition of the new metrics sensor
integration, real time location, and processing capability.
Finally, concerning the integration features, the last step is to determine the
correspondence among the offering features (incoming dependencies) of technology
and its claiming requirements (outgoing dependencies) on one hand, and the business
process requirements on the other, in order to obtain an integration model such as the
one shown in [3]. Starting with the analysis of technology contributions to each
business process, we can explore the way in which the technology features might
correspond into business requirements captured in the business process model. Fig. 3
shows the analysis of some contributions of a passive RFID system to a checking-out
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CEUR Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011)
Fig. 2. Extending the base RFID module into passive and active RFID modules.
process of a library (an integration model obtained from this analysis has been
presented in [3]). Thus, for example, we have that the attribute fast object
identification () of the passive RFID system (in fact, inherited from the general
RFID module) has a correspondence with both fast checking-out ( ), required
by library patrons, and fast checking-out management, required by the library, at
contributing positively to both of them. Continuing in this way the technology module
application to each business process can enable us to think in a passive RFID system
for a library.
4 Conclusions
In this paper we have presented an approach for modeling technology available for
supporting business process. Our approach is based on the concept of module which
allows us to create technology modules, i. e. , specifications of technological entities
Fig. 3. Business-technology correspondence between passive RFID and checking-out process
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CEUR Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011)
that can be then integrated into several business processes by means of a
correspondence analysis of technology features and business requirements. We have
considered four types of information required to specify technology modules
(differentiation, composition, refinement, and integration features). For the sake of
brevity, we have described just an overview of the approach focusing on technology
modeling and suggested the business-technology integration process allowed from
this approach.
5 Ongoing and Future Work
Other relevant aspects of our current work are: to formalize the notion of integration
using the concept of matching as introduced in [6]; to explore the possibility of
adding adaptation strategies depending on the results of technology evaluation as
done in [7]; to define a portfolio of patterns which describe the impact of technologies
using some predefined roles (e.g. , technology provider, technology manager, etc.); to
implement a support tool for concepts adopted (module, service, process, etc.); and to
evaluate the approach developing a real case study.
Acknowledgments. This work has been partially supported by the Spanish project
TIN2010-19130-C02-01. Eliel Moraless work has been supported by the CONACYT
grant 327254/229895.
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