Foreword

The software engineering business domain involves the fulfilment of business requirements with humans interacting to build a set of specifications. Human interaction in its turn can lead to frequently changing and ambiguously recorded information where different parties can provide different meaning to similar terminology. Such reasons increase significantly the possibility of failure to deliver enterprise systems, with failure rates reaching 70% of large scale projects.

Nowadays, rapidly changing business environments require strategic business planning and especially business modeling to capture change and direct the business accordingly. However, the current industrial landscape predisposes business solutions with a number of defects in terms of lack of understanding and implementing frameworks, methodologies and best practices. As a consequence, informal models or even non-modelled business solutions offer limited value to the business. Such informalities, may lead to a number of limitations such as the requirement for model specific training, difficulty in capturing changing business requirements, the use of inconsistent models which are not often updated and thus the lack in reusing them; in effect, leading to changes that will not be included in all the corresponding models creating inconsistencies since the models will no longer reflect the actual business concepts and environment.

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) contributed extensively in improving different facets of the software development product, such as quality, maintainability and, of the process, such as cost-efficiency and predictability. Achieving these aspects in software development required the orchestration of higher levels of abstraction where the use of metadata under transformation rules became dominant and where repetitive data of lower abstraction levels, such as actual software code, was eliminated. The antipodal point of MDA is, of course, Business Process Architecture (BPA) whereby attempts to raise the abstraction level of business processes led to the creation and mainstream adoption of a standardised notation for modeling; Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) by OMG. Likewise, MDA is a powerful software development method proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) which has experienced strong support by the software industry and academia.

In this sense, the organisation of the Model Driven Business Process Engineering Workshop held in 2012 at King’s College London, is an attempt on the marriage of the notion of the relatively new research area of the application of best practices from MDA techniques on BPA with examples from Software Development (Lano; Tsaramirsis), Project Management Frameworks (Zandu), Project Change Management (Apostolopoulos) and Enterprise Architecture (Almisned) arenas.

It is the aim of MDBPE to become a business solutions development method based on the use of models for the specification, design, analysis, synthesis, deployment, testing and maintenance of complex project environments to produce quality solutions that can significantly contribute to corporate decision making at a strategic level. Considering the ever increasing complexity and cost of the development of business solutions, MDBPE is an initiative that recognises the corporate needs of the global industrial landscape.