A Framework for Integrating Business Processes and Business Requirements

Service-oriented architectures and Web service infrastructure provide the ideal framework for interconnecting organizations and for defining distributed business applications. The possibility to exploit business process definition and execution languages is particularly relevant for capturing the process-oriented nature of these applications. However, business processes by themselves are not enough to manage the changes and to allow an organization to continuously adapt its business model to the needs typical for distributed applications. To achieve this flexibility, it is of uttermost importance to link the business processes to the organizational strategy and to the business goals that motivate the need of these processes. In this paper we propose a framework for representing strategies and goals of an organization in terms of business requirements. The framework allows to describe how an organizational strategy is operationalized into activities and implemented by business processes. It also allows to represent the contracts (assumptions) on the interactions between the different business applications. Finally, this framework allows for the usage of formal analysis techniques, in particular Model Checking, to pinpoint problems and to identify possible solutions in this domain