Model-based Validation of Business Processes

Abstract

Validation should be done in the context of understanding how a business process is intended to contribute to the business strategies of an organization. Validation can take place along a variety of dimensions including legal compliance, financial cost, customer value, and service quality. A business process modeling tool cannot anticipate all the ways in which a business process might need to be validated. However, it can provide a framework for extending model elements to represent context for a business process. It can also support information exchange to facilitate validation with other tools and systems. This chapter demonstrates a model-based approach to validation using a hospital approval process for accessing patient data in a data warehouse. An extensible meta-model, a flexible data exchange layer, and linkage between business processes and enterprise context are shown to be the critical elements in model-based business process validation.