Applying a Model-Driven Framework for Gap Analysis
The objective of business service engineering is the re-use of business process functionalities in new composite applications. To achieve this aim it is necessary to start capturing the existing application portfolio and software resources (i.e. legacy systems, existing enterprise applications, etc) and comparing them to “new” business service functions that need to be provided in a new, redesigned environment. This comparison between new business functions or business requirements (to-be) and current capabilities (as-is) is known in business process management sciences as gap analysis. This chapter presents a model-driven framework for gap analysis that identifies and conceptualizes the processes and services in a business domain by discovering potential overlaps and discrepancies between them. The proposal involves the identification and manipulation of mappings between as-is and standard to-be business process models. The authors describe, by means of a basic implementation, how model-driven techniques can be used to detect intersections and disparities between particular as-is and to-be models.