A quest for beauty and wealth (or, business processes for database researchers)

Abstract

While classic data management focuses on the data itself, research on Business Processes considers also the context in which this data is generated and manipulated, namely the processes, the users, and the goals that this data serves. This allows the analysts a better perspective of the organizational needs centered around the data. As such, this research is of fundamental importance. Much of the success of database systems in the last decade is due to the beauty and elegance of the relational model and its declarative query languages, combined with a rich spectrum of underlying evaluation and optimization techniques, and efficient implementations. This, in turn, has lead to an economic wealth for both the users and vendors of database systems. Similar beauty and wealth are sought for in the context of Business Processes. Much like the case for traditional database research, elegant modeling and rich underlying technology are likely to bring economic wealth for the Business Process owners and their users; both can benefit from easy formulation and analysis of the processes. While there have been many important advances in this research in recent years, there is still much to be desired: specifically, there have been many works that focus on the processes behavior (flow), and many that focus on its data, but only very few works have dealt with both. We will discuss here the important advantages of a holistic flow-and-data framework for Business Processes, the progress towards such a framework, and highlight the current gaps and research directions.