From: Didar Zowghi (didar@ics.mq.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2000 - 22:16:38 EST
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 15:25:32 EST
From: HaimK@aol.com
Dear Colleague:
You are invited to submit a paper to the forthcoming workshop on
Semantics of (business) specifications at TOOLS2000. The TOOLS
Conference will be held in Santa Barbara, CA, at the beginning of
August 2000 (www.tools.com).
Theme of the workshop: Relating business needs to IT
A brief summary of the key issues to be discussed:
Business specifications have been used for centuries and perhaps
millennia to understand and describe businesses independently of
their possible realization. This understanding often has been
expressed in a simple, clear, precise, and explicit way, so that
irrelevant details (e.g., possible solutions) were suppressed.
However, the current situation in IT development appears to be
less than ideal: 85% of IT departments in the US fail to meet
their organizations=92 strategic business needs (ComputerWorld,
October 11, 1999). Often, these business needs were =97 if
described at all =97 shown in lengthy unstructured narratives or
box-and-line diagrams.
We can do better than that and bring much more rigor to the world
of commercial development. Concepts and constructs for proper
handling of business =97 and any other =97 specifications exist, and
some of them have been formalized in various international
standardization activities such as the ISO Reference Model of
Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). The same concepts ought to
be reused for all kinds of specifications leading to fundamental
conceptual unity for all stages of the information management
lifecycle. Business specifications =97 like any other
specifications, for example, those of various system
architectures =97 should emphasize semantics (meaning) rather than
concentrate on buzzwords such as specifics of the currently
fashionable methodologies or toolsets. Specification of semantics
permits us not to start with a blank sheet of paper when we work
with business or other specifications. Reuse of concepts and
constructs (patterns) common to a large number of business or
system components saves intellectual effort, time and money.
These business patterns are precise and explicit, introduce
precision much earlier than in coding, and do not rely on the
tacit knowledge of the initiated members of the craft.
This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners
to discuss their successful and less than successful approaches
to creating and using business specifications and to explicitly
handling the fundamental similarity of concepts used in all kinds
of specifications.
The deadline for submission of short papers (5-10 pages) in the first
instance is April 30th.
-Haim Kilov
Technical Director
Business Component Modeling
Genesis Development Corporation
hkilov@gendev.com or haimk@acm.org
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