Colloquium Draheim

Abstract: In this talk Dr. Draheim will discuss in how far a structured approach can be applied to business process modelling. The reasoning is at the level of pragmatics of information system specification languages. Dr. Draheim will try to avoid getting lost in superficial comparisons of modelling language constructs but trying to understand the core problems of structuring business process specifications. It is common sense that structured programming is better than unstructured programming -- or let's say structurally unrestricted programming -- and this is what is taught as foundational knowledge in many standard curricula of many software engineering study programmes. With respect to business process modelling, in practice, you find huge business process models that are arbitrary nets. How comes? Is it somehow due to some lack of knowledge transfer from the programming language community to the information system community? For computer scientists, it might be tempting to state that structured programming is a proven concept and it is therefore necessary to eventually promote a structured business process modelling discipline, however, care must be taken. As an example Dirk Draheim takes forward one of his arguments here, which is subtle but important, i.e., that there are some diagrams expressing behaviour that cannot be transformed into a structured diagram expressing the same behaviour solely in terms of the same primitives as the original structurally unrestricted diagram.

Bio: Dirk Draheim holds a Diploma in computer science from the Technische Universität Berlin since 1994 and a PhD in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin since 2002. From 1990 to 2006 he worked as an IT freelancer in Berlin. In spring 2006 he was lecturer in HCI at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and from summer 2006 to summer 2008 he was Area Manager for Database Technology at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Linz, Austria. Furthermore, in winter 2006 he was visiting professor in Software Engineering at the University of Mannheim, Germany. In summer 2007 he was visiting lecturer in applied information systems at the Johannes-Kepler-Universität Linz, Austria. Since October 2008 he is head of the Central IT Service Management division (ZID) of the University of Innsbruck. Dirk Draheim is co-founder of TEAA - the International Conference on Trends in Enterprise Application Architecture, was PC chair of TEAA 2005 and TEAA 2006 and is steering committee member of the EDOC conference series -- the Enterprise Computing Conference. He is author of the Springer books "Form-Oriented Analysis" and "Business Process Technology". Dirk Draheim is member of the ACM.