An Abstraction Layer for Querying and Understanding Business Process Behaviours

Business intelligence is the commercial term for using information within organizations to make informed decisions, and to run operations effectively based on known data. The Canadian business intelligence (BI) market is projected to increase from C$185 million in 2006 to over C$290 million by 2011. Ontario is home to Cognos, a world leader in BI, which was recently acquired by IBM. The proposed collaboration between the University of Toronto, IBM Cognos, and IBM Research would use an emerging technology for business process management, called "business entities with lifecycles" (a.k.a. "business artifacts"), to develop a qualitative expansion in the kinds of BI queries that can be posed. In particular, the approach should enable queries over process execution histories, at different granularities and unified across regional and other variations. The outcome of this project will provide a framework that could enable fundamentally new ways to use IBM's Cognos products to gather business intelligence, which would increase the penetration of Cognos tools into customers worldwide.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Renee Miller

Student:

Hoijjat Ghaderi

Partner:

IBM Canada

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Management of companies and enterprises

University:

University of Toronto