Pietu Pohjalainen, THL, contact contact firstname.lastname@thl.fi for more details.
Many organizations use enterprise architecture as a tool for defining their operations. Business process charts are used to model the workflow of the organization's services and operations. Originated in the area of large business information management, the idea of enterprise architecture is now being mandated in organizations of various sizes. For example, in Finland, many public organizations are required to model their enterprise architecture by the law [1].
Currently, many tools exist for modeling an organization's enterprise architecture. Many of these tools are notoriously from the pre-web era: they are used as desktop applications, in which an enterprise architect treats the modeling artifacts on her own hard drive; and the results are to be included in the printed documentation binder. When the modeling is completed, the set of documentation is given out to an implementation team as the requirements document. This is a rigid, inflexible way of working; current process researchers would classify this as a waterfall process model.
Small and medium size businesses and governmental organizations need more flexible tools for implementing their architecture. Organization having too rigid application development cycle leads to development of shadow applications within the organization [2]. This is a productivity losing situation, as different departments reinvent their own versions of the enterprise's applications, using their own view of the organization's functions.
Modern web technologies allow the use of direct edibility of modeling artifacts. For example, web-based interface builders can be utilized to build web sites directly: see [3] for a demo. With the term direct editability we refer to the possibility to perform live updates to a running system, and being able to see the effects of the modification instantly. This leads to reduced edit/deploy/test cycle times, since updates can be done at runtime.
The final aspect in this project is the elasticity of workflows. Traditionally, cloud-based elasticity refers to the application performance scalability in the cloud environment, since it is possible to up- and downscale the number of servers allocated to a given application. Also processes can be elastic in terms of resource consumption and quality of service [4].
In this project, we build a prototype of a tool for implementing applications for a given enterprise architecture. The tool utilizes directly editable workflows and allows the definition of workflow data models at runtime. This project is done in collaboration with the National Institute for Health and Welfare [5].
Attend to this project if you are interested in the following:
Viitteet
Lisätietoa
Projekti toteutetaan laitoksen yleisen lisenssisopimuksen alaisuudessa (GPLv2).