A SOA-Based ARIS Model For BPR

BPR (Business Process Reengineering) is one of major concerns while enterprises face a changing environment. It requires the information system to be more integrated and flexible. As the enabler, IS (information system) model provides the methodology for BPR. ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information System) is a multi-view and lifecycle IS model with strong support from business solutions. But it provides limited flexibility for BPR and small support for IS implementation.SOA could strongly make up for ARIS's shortage. As a software framework, SOA could be a supporting tool for process management. On the other hand, the usage of SOA in the design phase of process management will expand the SOA research and application. The conjunction which holds SOA and ARIS together is that flexibility and reusability from SOA could offset ARIS's disadvantages.This paper proposes a SOA-based ARIS model for BPR. It collects and liquidates BPR demands from unstructured to being structured. These demands might be dynamically added up, modified or deleted at any time. Structured demands will be analyzed through EPC, process and human resources perspectives and next, the model will provide reusable suggestions and optimization solutions. Finally, all possible solutions will be taken into consideration whether reuse EPC, process or human resource and all of them will be linked together again to form EPCs to support business processes.An experimental demonstration is illustrated to prove the feasibility of this model. It uses a real background but is implemented virtually by an experimental system. The experimental system is developed with Visual Studio 2003 (C#) and .Net Framework 1.1. The process engine uses the idea from NetBpm which is a famous open sourced BPM project with engine to link legacy systems with WS-based systems. But the model proposed in this paper is implemented and added. Similar to model design, there are 5 key services (BPR Analysis WS, EPC Analysis WS, Process Analysis WS, HR Analysis WS and EPC Reuse WS) and an online implementation platform.