Linking Business Processes with User Interfaces
Abstract
Usi4Biz is a tool developed on the Java platform, in the context of a PhD research at the Université catholique de Louvain, to assist business analysts associating business processes activities with user interfaces that are used to perform these activities, and also make end-users aware of which activities of the business process they are performing when using a specific user interface. The basis of this approach is a network of links from business process models, imported from existing modeling tools, until final user interfaces, independent of the technology in which they were developed. The benefits of this approach impacts not only IT stakeholders, but end-users and business analysts by: a) concretely representing how activities are performed through organization's systems; b) showing the impact of business modifications on the way users are going to operate systems; c) keeping the end-users aware of which part of the process is being executed when interacting with a specific user interface; d) allowing end-users to report bottlenecks and suggestions of improvement in user interfaces that cannot be detected by monitoring tools; and e) providing analytical data that supports the analysis of users, user interfaces and business processes, enabling fast adaptation to the business dynamism.
Instead of using existing IT approaches, such as SOA, to manage processes and its technological implementation, we are focusing on people who are the ones who effectively perform the processes though systems. These systems are considered, mainly their user interfaces, but agile methodologies have been showing that giving more attention to people, systems become naturally more adapted to their work, independent of the applied technology.
During the session, we are going to shortly present the problematic addressed by the tool, more details about its software architecture, integration with existing tools and some results of its application in large organizations in Belgium.
Speaker
Hildeberto Mendonça is a PhD researcher at the Louvain Polytechnic School of Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) where he works with Multimodal User Interaction. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science at University of Fortaleza, Brazil. During his undergraduate studies he worked in the Laboratory of Human Computer Interaction with distance learning and digital TV projects. Afterwards, he worked in the Laboratory of Knowledge Management with public security and knowledge bases projects. He has finished his Diploma of Extended Studies in Human Computer Interaction Meta Representation. He has a rich professional experience in web application development, collaborative systems, and software engineering and software architecture projects. His technical skills are in the Java platform and its main extensions, C++, XML, relational databases, distributed systems, web services, web and desktop user interfaces, and creation and maintenance of knowledge bases.
Kênia Sousa is a PhD researcher at the Louvain School of Management of Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) where she works in the Belgian Laboratory of Computer-Human Interaction (BCHI) with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Business Process Management. She has her Masters degree from University of Fortaleza, Brazil, during this time she was the Vice-Chair of the ACM SIGCHI Brazilian Organizing Committee. In the industry, she has provided consulting services for software organizations on the definition of the software development process. Currently, she is member of the ACM SIGCHI Belgian Chapter and member of the UsiXML Consortium.
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