Configurable visual representations for business process monitoring

Abstract

Business processes are one of the most important assets that a company has. The success of the business depends directly on the quality of these processes. This makes business process reengineering and business process improvement the key task of a business analyst. To support monitoring and analysis steps, an advanced approach for process visualization is required. The main problem is that several different professionals have to collaborate in order to prepare an expressive visualization for a monitoring and analysis application. Only advanced visualization will allow the business analyst to analyze the process and improve it. It implies that a process can change rapidly. Under these conditions the visualization has to be created rapidly, too. This work proposes a concept of collaboration between professionals who prepare the visualization: between the visual designer and information designer. The artifacts they work with are loosely coupled: visual templates, visual configurations and data. The visual designer prepares visual templates and knows very little details about the rest of the system. The information designer applies these templates to the monitoring and analysis application, since it is very unlikely that visual designer will be able to do this. This work proposes visual templates, which are decoupled from the rest of the system, and visual configurations, which reference templates to build concrete process visualizations for analysis and monitoring. To prove this concept, it has been put in practice as part of this work. The realized framework is named "Vipro". A new template format, fully compatible with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and a visual configuration format have been defined. An editor for visual configurations has been developed. Finally, a Web service for visualization has been developed to enable the integration with existing systems. In the very end, a set of test cases inspired by real requirements illustrate the capabilities of the Vipro framework.