1. University environments have recurrent
and transient IT infrastructure needs in
pursuit of research, administration and
instruction. Provisioning these resources
on-demand is the marriage of an IT
resource request process – the business
process – and IT service delivery to fulfill
that request. Ongoing research at The
George Washington University’s Columbian
College of Arts and Sciences is exploring
a managed approach to IT resource
provisioning and the following:
• What, if any, are the benefits of structured
service-oriented BPM at GWU to meet
common IT resource needs?
• How can we build an effective analytical
framework for the potential BPM and SOA
implementation that accounts for usability
of such an implementation?
A service-oriented, user-centered approach to
Preliminary Results
Business Process Management (BPM) in a university setting
Ryan Dellolio
The George Washington University
Web Program Manager
Columbian College of Arts and Sciences
Semantics
Configuration Ontologies
(OWL)
SOA
Identify candidate IT services and
associated processes
Pre-defined calls to
infrastructure
Service calls enable the
BPM system to provision IT
services, while semantics
provide a common language
for describing the resources
and configuration. Combined
with business process
definitions this provides
powerful agility, consistency
and automation. [1] [2]
Example
“Faculty member requests new website for a research group.”
Current State
Potential Future State
Create configuration ontologies, resource
descriptions
1 IBM Business Process Manager
2 Microsoft BizTalk Server
3 Custom in-house (probably web)
application
Such a system of IT request fulfillment
will provide faster, more efficient service
for University faculty and staff who make
routine requests of the IT services group.
In some cases, IT staff may not be involved
in IT service delivery at all. The reliability
and consistency of BPM methodologies
with Business Process Automation (BPA)
capabilities hold the promise of increasing
user satisfaction, lowering costs and
streamlining operations.
Next Steps
Next steps include solidifying detailed
requirements, identifying candidate IT
services and associated processes,
establishing an evaluation framework for
potential solutions and then moving forward
with a pilot.
References
Map request archetypes to processes and
service calls
Automate IT service requests using BPM
system
GWU is currently evaluating three potential
solutions:
Discussion
Standard Resource
Descriptions (RDF)
Methodology
Our approach for automating IT service
provisioning is as follows:
Adjunct Lecturer
Department of Information Systems
School of Business
The Semantic Approach
BPM
Ongoing Research
Other example requests include: requests for shared file storage, requests for accounts
on high performance computing clusters, requests for user accounts, requests for
maintenance.
[1] H.H. Shahri, J.A. Hendler and A.A. Porter,
“Software Configuration Management Using
Ontologies”, Proc. Third Int’l Workshop Semantic
Web Enabled Software Eng., June 2007.
[2] W. Abramowicz, D. Fensel, and U. Frank,
“Semantics and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support
Business Process Management”, Business &
Information Systems Engineering, January 2010.