Product Description

"An excellent hands–on book for practitioners eager to document the internal structure and everyday workings of business processes. This clear and practical book belongs on the shelf of everyone dedicated to mapping, maintaining, and streamlining business processes." –Richard Mark Soley, Phd, Chairman and CEO, OMG
"Eriksson and Penker have not just written another patterns book; this is a significant contribution to the key field of business–IT alignment. While capturing profound academic insights, what makes the book so refreshing from a practitioner′s viewpoint is the richness of accessible, down–to–earth examples and its pragmatic, unpretentious style."–Paul allen Principal of CBD Strategies and Architectures, Sterling Software
"UML may have been designed by and for software engineers, but Eriksson and Penker have defined a practical extension to UML for describing business processes. They put this extended UML immediately to use with a gallery of common business patterns that should jump start any BPR effort."–Philippe Krchten, Director of Process Development Rational Software
"This book is a marriage between proven business modeling concepts and the techniques of UML. It provides real–world strategies for developing large–scale, mission–critical business systems in a manner accessible to both software and business professionals."–ScottW. Ambler, Author of Process Patterns
Following up on their bestselling book, UML Toolkit, Hans–Erik Eriksson and Magnus Penker now provide expert guidance on how to use UML to model your business systems. In this informative book, key business modeling concepts are presented, including how to define Business Rules with UML′s Object Constraint Language (OCL) and how to use business models with use cases. The authors then provide 26 valuable Business Patterns along with an e–business case study that utilizes the techniques and patterns discussed in the book.
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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470174 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Unified Modeling Language is an object oriented language specifically designed to model business processes. Although it only dates back to 1997 UML is becoming increasingly important through its association with IT and information systems. A major problem for business support program authors is a lack of precision in their knowledge of the way the business itself works. UML can be used to model every aspect of a business and provide the scaffolding on which support programs are built. Business models are also useful for identifying areas where the business efficiency can be improved, redundant activities and areas ripe for hardware or software automation. Many business processes are complex and come in the form of assumptions staff pick up by osmosis. Defining rules for these often hidden processes can be tricky. In Business Modeling with UML, authors show you how to define usable business rules with UML's OCL (Object Constraint Language).

Inevitably, the authors devote a great deal of the book to business patterns--26 of them in all. However, these follow logically from the earlier chapters. As well as providing a basis for your own models these patterns illuminate and expand on the earlier explanatory material. Interestingly, one of the aims of Business Modeling With UML is to extend the usefulness of the technique from software engineers--by and for whom it was designed--to a range of business processes not necessarily directly concerned with programmatic information systems. In practice, it's hard to see a general manager sitting down to model processes in UML. UML itself requires a grasp of object oriented programming techniques you're unlikely to pick up by accident. However, this excellent book should help IT managers demonstrate how they can proactively contribute to a company's success instead of being seen as a low level resource called on only when a new accounting module is needed.--Steve Patient

Computer Bulletin, September 2000
"...excellent value for money."

Review
"...excellent value for money." (Computer Bulletin, September 2000)

Customer Reviews

A very good guide to business-level modelling with UML
One of the weaknesses of the Unified Modelling Language is its relatively limited support for modelling at the Enterprise level, especially to accurately model business processes. The UML purists believe that everything should be reduced to Use Cases, while these authors recognise that much more is necessary.

The book covers five quite distinct topics:
1. An introduction to business modelling and UML, explaining the problems the authors want to help solve, and describing each of the relevant techniques of UML,
2. A proposal for a group of extensions to UML (using that language's own established extensibility mechanisms) so that that it can better model business processes,
3. A description of the variety of views and models which will be required to establish a comprehensive understanding of the business, or at least part of it,
4. A repository of "business patterns", which you can use to model the business,
5. A comprehensive worked example.

Each of these is quite detailed. In particular, the book contains probably the best introduction to the Object Constraint Language (OCL), and its use to model business rules, that I have read anywhere. The sections on how to do business modelling are also very good, as are the introductions to the relevant UML techniques.

The "Eriksson-Penker extensions for business modelling" are important because several UML-based case tools have now implemented them as an emerging standard for business process modelling with UML. If you want to fully understand how these work, this is the book to read.

The business patterns are more of a "curates egg". Some are extremely useful, and others innovative which could easily solve your problems where there is an accurate match. That said, some are less good and seem to state the obvious, although with patterns it is always difficult to know if you are judging some harshly simply because you are so familiar with them and other readers will get more value. Some of the pattern explanations are a bit repetitive, and the "examples" often sound very artificial, but overall they are useful, and a single one which solves a real business modelling problem for you will justify the rest.

At over 400 pages, some of which is occasionally slightly slow and ponderous this is not an ideal book to read from cover to cover. But it is definitely one to study, focusing on whichever topic is most relevant to you at any time, and I can happily recommend it.

Want to do process/business modelling AND use UML?
For people with a background in process modelling, information and rule based modelling the concepts won't be very new. However, it does show how extended UML notation can be used to document processes (eg covering goals, inputs, outputs, resources, events ...).

There's also a useful stock of patterns:

1) Resource & rule patterns (eg Organisation & Party pattern)

2) Goal Patterns (eg Business Goal-problem)

3) Process Patterns (eg process layer control)

I found this more useful from a meta-modeling perspective rather than a source of patterns for specific business areas.

The Assembly-line diagram introduced in the book (not part of 'standard UML') is a neat way of showing the interaction between processes and classes.

My impression is that the authors have a bit of 'UML can cover everything' zeal and to be honest I think that when working with business users I'd be more inclined to use IDEF0 varients, process maps and use cases.

Having said that this is excellent stuff for Business modellers working at a logical level and for people looking to develop metamodels.