Abstract
(Business) Information systems become more and more complex due to an increase in the volume of data, but also due to more and more interconnected elements that all need to be orchestrated to perform as a uniform system. Correctly understanding and describing (business) processes, is one of the cornerstone foundations in the creation of almost all information systems. While the systems themselves have become more complex, and the means to program them have evolved over the last decades, the means to analyze and communicate about the processes they execute have stagnated on a simplistic level from the 1960s. Over the last 15 years, there has been work done in the development of concepts and tools on the topic of subject-orientation and subject-oriented (business) process modeling and management (S-BPM) that is different from earlier, classical process description approaches. This paper analyzes and argues about the shortcomings and discrepancies of those classical approaches and argues how subject-orientation may be an improvement when employed as a means in the design and development of information systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Further discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of the procedural vs. object-oriented programming paradigm should be common knowledge in the domain of business information systems. Otherwise [10] or any Google search should provide an in-depth.
- 2.
Supposedly, the most widely used process-modeling tool in existence.
- 3.
In programming, the equivalent would be the concept of “spaghetti code”.
- 4.
A process management discipline that is oriented towards and heavily incorporates the Subject-Orientated modeling paradigm.
- 5.
This, however, is only an advice, since, e.g., the object-oriented programming language Java does not have the formal means to express the distinction of threads classes and data classes and mixing is possible.
- 6.
Teaching observation: people without prior formal process modeling experience seem to have less problems adopting to the SID/SBD structure of PASS in contrast to formally schooled process models that futilely try to apply the classical linear modeling structures also to subject-oriented models.
- 7.
Which is the actual problem, as real-life process rarely tend to not fit on one slide.
- 8.
Obviously, object-oriented abstraction concepts like inheritance (is-a) are used for passive data-objects. In PASS, these are the messages and according business objects transferred by them.
- 9.
More than half of the world’s languages have a subject-object-verb (SOV) structure. Among them Turkish, Japanese, or Latin. Roughly 30% have the subject-verb-object (SVO) structure e.g. the English or German languages [23].
- 10.
E.g., a programmer may consider “request” and “order” as two different data items that need to be implemented into a business information system, possibly costing multiple hours of unnecessary development work before found to be the same. Alternatively, worse, if not found, causing confusion and misunderstandings when a system goes live.
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Elstermann, M., Ovtcharova, J. (2019). Subject-Orientation as a Means for Business Information System Design – A Theoretical Analysis and Summary. In: Abramowicz, W., Corchuelo, R. (eds) Business Information Systems. BIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 353. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20485-3_25
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