Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Today’s enterprises are putting much effort into integrating Web 2.0 into their day-to-day businesses. Referred to Enterprise 2.0 (Maamar et al., 2014), such enterprises aim at achieving different goals through Web 2.0 (McAfee, 2006) like improving their visibility on search engines, reducing the cost of some services such as communication, improving the quality of services they provide especially those related to customer satisfaction, etc. In addition, they may also use Web 2.0 applications to improve transparency by enhancing the availability of information and knowledge across their organizational units (DiStaso & Bortree, 2012).
It is largely known that the success of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) endeavors is heavily dependent on re-engineering (i.e., revisiting the current way of doing things) the existing practices in any enterprise. These practices are often associated with Business Processes (BP)s. In the case of Enterprise 2.0, re-engineering will lead to Social Business Process (SBP) (Yahya, Boukadi, Maamar, & Abdallah, 2015). On the one hand, an SBP would help integrate interactions over Web 2.0 into the SBP model so that ``to-be’’ versus ``as-is’’ processes are aligned and, on the other hand, it would comply with the separation of concerns principle since business and social aspects will be handled separately. The business aspect may be represented using any existing notation like an UML activity diagram(OMG, 2011) and the standard BPMN language (ISO/IEC, 2013). However, existing notations do not support modeling the social aspects like who is posting what and who is responding to this post.
In this paper, we address the lack of proper languages for modeling SBPs by proposing a Domain Specific Language (DSL). As opposed to defining the proposed SDL from scratch, we opted for extending an existing language. This definition approach makes our SDL benefit from best practices, standards, tools, etc., and it increases its adoption potential. As such, we first defined an SBP meta-model (SBP2M) by enriching the BP meta-model proposed in(Curtis, Kellner, & Over, 1992) with social aspects. Secondly, based on the obtained meta-model, we develop our BPMN extension, called BPMN4Social, for modeling social business processes. BPMN4Social is a simple, yet generic domain-specific language that is based on BPMN, the de facto standard for BP modeling. Besides the new notations, BPMN4Social is supported by a set of socialization patterns that would further facilitate its use by end-users. Indeed, we developed a catalog of socialization patterns each referring to a particular Web 2.0-based interaction like sharing scenario that can be used during SBP modeling. BPMN4Social as well as the proposed patterns are implemented as an extension of the BPMN2 modeler editor. Consequently, BP designers can drag and drop the required element (i.e., BPMN4Social notation or socialization pattern) within their SBP model. In terms of usability, our graphical editor for BPMN4Social has been evaluated with reference to effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction quality characteristics among those defined in the ISO\IEC 25010 quality in use model (ISO/IEC25010, 2011).
This paper exposes the following contributions: (i) a meta-model for SBP, called SBP2M, that distinguishes between social and no-social elements in an SBP; (ii) a DSL for SBP modeling that fully complies with the proposed meta-model as well as a catalog of socialization patterns; and (iii) an evaluation of the proposed DSL with reference to some quality characteristics from the quality in use model of the ISO\IEC 25010 standard (ISO/IEC25010, 2011). Before presenting these contributions, the remainder of this paper first discusses works related to SBP. Section “Social Business Process Meta-model” introduces the SBP2M meta-model. Section “BPMN4Social for Social Business Process Modeling” presents BPMN4Social including its meta-model, concrete syntax, socialization patterns, and graphical editor. Section “Evaluation” discusses the different steps and results of the evaluation conducted to assess the quality of the proposed solution. Finally, Section “Conclusion” summarizes the paper and outlines future works.