Marwane El Kharbili

Apr 28, 2008

About innovation...

I wanted to write once about innovation. Actually, this post by Scott Berkun about innovation motivated me to write my thoughts about a topic that I like a lot. Scott discusses his view on the subject and how to innovate immediately.

What is innovation? Who are innovators? And how do you innovate? Many people think that innovators are only people like Einstein, Galileo or newton. Revolutionary thinkers who have had success in bringing their ideas to the world and convince the world of the correctness of these. I am a computer scientist and a mathematician, that's why I have chosen scientists as example, but there is no reason why I should limit the scope of innovation to scientists. Innvators could be artists, architects, engineers, medicine doctors, your dog's veterinary, the guy who built all the houses in your district, the secretary of your colleague at work or any wife at home that has a full job managing a family, 4 children and a house. Innovators are not only people who have become famous for their ideas or realizations, famous innovators are only the peak of the iceberg. Most innovators will remain unknown to the general public forever, limiting themselves to the scope defined by the people their innovations influenced directly. with the pervasiveness of electronic information of the age we are living in, innovations are more likely to have a far wider reach than ever before though.

Innovation doesn't require you to revolutionize the world. Because every small thing that exists in this world can be made better, anybody can innovate. Innovation require you to simply have a different look on things as other people. If you look at the huge variety of lifestyles, of food and music in the world, you would notice that you woon't finde two places in the world where things are done the same way. The same music instruments are used in very different ways depending on the country. The way Moroccans play music with a violin, is completely different from the ways gypsies do, and even more different than the way violins are used in classical music. Another example: hamburgers are a very widely appreciated fast-food. Maybe for the wrong reasons. But is is a fact that no two restaurants in the US, europe, africa or asia do hamburgers the same way. This is a fact. people just have different perspectives on life.

Well applying your own perspective on life and on everything you may have to deal with, without caring about how it should be done, this is already innovation. Innovation is a state of mind. And innovation is sometimes the only way to bring you out of a dead end. because there is no solution to a certain problem, it doesn't necessarily mean that the problem has no solutions, it may simply mean that the problem needs to be looked at from a radically different perspective.

In order to innovate, ScottBerkun identified the following three steps:

1. Ask questions: Why are things done this way? What can be changed? How could it be done in a better way?

2. Try things: just keep on trying, and getting better. Nobody finds a solution to a problem on the first try, nobody. And experiencing things by yourself is the best way to learn what is lacking, missing, bad or good in a system. Again, here, accepting defeats or frustrations is sometimes the hard way to the top, the only way to the top. If you don not try to lose things yourself, nobody is going to do it for you. Because nobody else has asked himself the questions you have asked. If Ibn Sina (the famous Arab scientist who among other things made discoveries in human anatomy that are reference still today) also known as Avicenne in the western world, hadn't tried to find out how blood does go through our body and identified the body's veins network, it may well be that nobody would have.

3. Believe in what you are doing: there is a difference between taking other people's comments on what you are doing and following their comments. If you are doing things the wy you are, it is because you have good enough reasons for that. If you are honest with yourself and find answers to critics and comments from other people, that there is one of two paths you are going to take: either accept the comment of at least part of it, and thus adjusting your approach, or answering the critics because you have some arguments against them. If people accept them or not, this is their problem, as long as you are convinced of what you are doing and have good enough answers for yourself. People just may not see the new things and innovation you are bringing or understand what and why you are doing it, it doesn't mean that what you are doing desn't make sense.

4. Be curious: Learn what other people in other periods of history or periods of time have been doing. Learn from past errors and successes, in one sentence: search: analyze, learn and use.

5. Learn from your tries: just as in sports, trying without analyzing and learning from the new things that you have just tried, well, the try just doesn't help anyone.

If allied to the necessary open-mindedness and experience, being able to place yourself in a state of mind that allows you to look at things in unusual ways, may well lead you to come up with your next innovation. and any job in the world is a lot more interesting if it gives the necessary place to innovation. So keep innovating!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Apr 26, 2008

The EBRC08 is knocking on the doors

The European Business Rules Conference is there soon. I had already made a post about it and had given my own selection of the talks I would love to be at. The EBRC is going to take place from the 16th to the 18th of June in Munich. You'll get 14 sessions on 3 tracks. The track that has got to be very appealing to me is the know-how track : "Rules & Business processes". keynotes are going to be given by Ronald G. Ross and Marc Kerremans. If you register before April the 30th, you get to profit from a special offer.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Apr 24, 2008

Is my Blog about BPEL?

Well, I might suprise you by saying among other things of course, but BPEL is certainly a topic of interest to me. yes! This question is motivated by the fact that I discovered that my blog was listed on BPEL.XML as a blog dealing with BPEL. I was surprised and pleased at the same time. You can see the whole list of blogs here, if you are interested.

It is not because BPEL like BPM, web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, SOA and other acronyms And this for many reasons has become a piece of jewelry that every blog can afford and has to wear in order to attract some readers. BPEL is a de facto standard for business process execution languages. This itself is a reason enough. All technical BPM vendors I know of support BPEL. In ARIS too BPEL is supported (Modeling and transformations from business process modeling notations like EPC and BPMN for example) in ARIS (e.g. SOA Architect). Designing Business Process Models with the background idea that these are destined to be transformed into BPEL is fundamentally different from utterly designing BP models on the business level. A whole set of additional constraints become necessary, on what the modeler is allowed to model.

Additionally, the ultimate goal of process transformations, is to achieve the ability of propagating all the models information and data you define for business processes to the execution level, where processes really take place. This would show the strength and power of such transformations. Simply because they form a transport channel of the business requirements and logic from the business level to the execution level, where the modeled and incepted added value is really realized. Every bit of information (your business system's entropy, if you will) you lose on the way to the execution system is a loss for the business.

These are the reasons why I think that although separation between BP modeling and BP execution is necessary for the sake of business, being really careful about what happens with BPEL and paying attention at how it could influence BPM is crucial.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Apr 22, 2008

ARIS Blog is Launched!

On the 18th of April 2008, our own blog on ARIS and related technologies has been launched. You can find it here: http://www.aris.com/blog. The blog is maintained by experts in the many areas the IDS Scheer is active in. You will find articles about governance, risk and compliance, business rules, BPM, SOA, Process Intelligence and controlling, and of course general topics around ARIS. This is not another marketing initiative, you will really find useful information on this one. Posts do not only relate to IDS's products, more to the technologies around it, our experience in BPM, to ARIS and to the topics that are relevant to the market. So make sure you don't miss on this one, get yourself subscribed to the Rss feed and come discuss with us your point of view on the topics we are writing about.

Marwane El Kharbili.


Apr 21, 2008

Sebastian's PhD Blog

A quick link to Sebastian's PhD blog here. Sebastian is also a researcher and an engineer here at the IDS Scheer working on his PhD too. Sebastian started his PhD a little more than a year and a half earlier than me, and thus tutored me during the first couple of months of my Phd by providing me with tips and introducing me to the research projects we are working on. Sebastian is now in the last sprint phase of his PhD. He is working on nicely finishing and packaging his dissertation and writing the final document. I wish him lots of luck and lots of energy in this last phase, which is the most intensive and tiring phase of a PhD, both mentally and physically.

In his blog, Sebastian discusses a number of subjects, quite various I have to say, which gives a little insight into his interests. You'll find PhD and research related posts, posts about topics of interest such as SOA, and technical posts. You'll also find some posts about quite different things such as medicine, tech or trip reports such as the one about the Kilimanjaro ascension.

It is also accessible through the permalink in my blogroll list. So make sure you have checked this out.

Marwane El Kharbili

Apr 20, 2008

Microsoft, Sun & Eclipse

What do these three have to do with another? Until now, not much. But this has now changed.

Let's start with sun. Sun always was reluctant to any collaboration with the Eclipse project. Eclipse is a project started by IBM, big concurrent of Sun, and turned open-source afterwards. Sun (creators of Java, of course) have their own open source Java IDE, named NetBeans, which has always been pushed forward by Sun and also has a substantially strong community. But now Eclipse is way more than just an IDE for Java. The 1 million members strong community turned the completely modular architecture of Eclipse (totallyPlug-In based) into a technological base for a big number of languages and technologies. And Eclipse keeps growing. At the EclipseCon 2008 (23-26 of March 2008 in Santa Clara, California), Eclipse 4 was announced for in 2 years. So what has now changed? Well, Sun made a move towards Eclipse, by choosing EclipseLink (the Eclipse Persistence Services Project) as the reference implementation for the Java Persistence API 2.0 specification. EclipseLink is an Open Source implementation (have a look at the project's blog) of the TopLink infrastructure (a project by Ocracle). So this is one of its kind for Sun.

Microsoft on the other way, have made another kind of approach. This also has indirectly something to do with Eclipse. Microsoft decided to collaborate with the Eclipse foundation and set up a team of engineers to work on interoperability between the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit, Eclipse's pendant of SWING, used in Eclipse to implement GUIs) and the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, previously known under codename Avalon ), Microsoft's graphical Library shipped with Vista. Another team is also going to work on the Eclipse Hibbins project. Additionally, Sam Ramji (Strategy Director for technology platforms at Microsoft) announced a possible Integration of Eclipse to Silverlight (Microsoft's new web presentation platform).

No need to say there is some movement around Eclipse by big players. What this means? Where it leads to? Too soon to say it. Only one thing is for sure, One eye kept on strategic movements towards Eclipse by big players is certainly no lost time. You may not want to miss up on some synergy that could substantially add some new business models to your company. The least I can say is that Eclipse is on moving in the right direction, at the basis of its concept from the start: Interoperate with whomever you can, it'll only make more things possible.

Marwane El Kharbili.


PhD Thesis

I am an international cotutelle PhD student enrolled at both the University of Luxemburg and the University of Osnabrück (Germany), as part of a collaboration program between both universities. My area of research is software engineering and I am particularly interested in developing a method and language for regulatory compliance modeling and verification. For more details about my research interests and contributions have a look at my research page.

I am writing my thesis under the supervision of:
Previously to this, I was working for the IDS Scheer AG in the ARIS Research department. I was involved in international research projects on semantic BPM also tackling compliance management issues. During this period I authored and co-authored several scientific publications (see my publications page). I was also involved in the design of the business rule management solution of the ARIS platform for business process management.

I submitted my research proposal to Professors Pierre Kelsen and Elke Pulvermüller on October 2008. The proposal got accepted during the year 2009 and I officially started working on my thesis on August 2009. My research on compliance in business process management had already begun druing my duty at the ARIS Research in June 2007.

Research



Research Interests


Summary of PhD research

Business process management (BPM) is a core research area in information systems. In particular, the problem of adequate and precise modeling of semantically rich enterprise structure and behavior, as well as the problem of compliance management with regulations are challenges on which I focus in my research. My dissertation provides a formal and model driven framework for covering the regulatory compliance lifecycle in BPM. Policies are used for modeling compliance and model-checking techniques are used for verifying compliance.

Research Vision
The vision of an intelligent, real-time and adaptive enterprise is what drives my research. Therefore the study of enterprise modeling and in particular of business processes is central. However, the big scale and the speed at which data is produced and needs to be processed by information systems strongly challenges current practices and will push the limits of How we make our Information Systems (IS) and What we make them do it. I do believe that the adequate use of carefully engineered business policies and rules, complex event processing (CEP), and model-driven engineering (MDE) may very well form a unique blend of tools worth researching and applying to the governance of information systems, hence leveraging the practice into a more automated and intelligent form.

Research Mission
Business process management (BPM) is a core research area in information systems. My main objective is the use of formal methods to model semantically rich enterprise business processes, which can be verified for compliance with regulations. Enterprise business processes encompass several aspects such as control flow, data flow, resource flow and also provide a link to the motivation level through risks and goals. In particular, the study of the use of policies and rules, model driven technologies and design patterns to represent regulations and verify them on business processes is tackled in my PhD research.

Current Research Focus

The issue of Regulatory Compliance Management (RCM) in information systems is core to my research. It has been tackled in the context of enterprise models and in particular business processes in my initial research, and also in the context of processes defined over the semantic web using semantic web services and ontologies.

RCM has potentially implications for and applications to a variety of domains including enterprise architectures/models, service-oriented-architectures (SOA), requirements engineering and the semantic web. 

I rely on using and adapting techniques from the software engineering sub-areas of model-driven-engineering (formal metamodeling, model transformations) and verification (model checking) to support the full lifecycle of RCM.

Key Areas of Interest
The main areas of interest listed here cover a wide range of topics, due on the one part to the multidisciplinary nature of the research I was involved in, and on the other hand to the potential applications of research results achieved up until now:
1. Business Process Management, in particular the modeling, simulation/monitoring and analysis parts of the lifecycle.
2. Policy and Rule Management, and more generally Decision Management as a means for enabling the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise.
3. Conceptual modeling and application to enterprise models/architectures.
4. Service Oriented Computing.
5. Meta-modeling, model transformation and model composition.
7. Requirements engineering of security and policy requirements.
8.I also made contributions to the semantic web as well as complex event processing.
Reviewer

  • For the Electronic Markets - International Journal on Networked Business. http://www.electronicmarkets.org/.
  • For the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2011/. Software Engineering Track: http://paris.utdallas.edu/sacse11/.
  • For the book: Electronic Business Interoperability - Concepts, Opportunities and Challenges. A book edited by: Ejub Kajan (State University of Novi Pazar, Serbia). IGI Global. To appear in 2011. http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=45956.
  • For the book: Modern Software Engineering Concepts and Practices: Advanced Approaches. A book edited by (Dr. Ali H. Dogru, Middle East Technical University, Turkey and Mr. Veli Bicer, FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Germany). http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=687.
  • Reviewer at the ECIS 2008: European Conference on Information Systems - Track 6: Strategic Management of IS and IT. http://www.ecis2008.ie/
Research Schools
  • 2nd International Summer school on domain specific modeling - theory and practice, 2011, 12-16.09.2011. http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DSM-TP/
  • 1st International summer school on domain specific modeling - theory and practice, 2010, 06-09.09.2010. DSM-TP 2010, Casa da Cerca, Lisbon Portugal. http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DSM-TP/.
  • European Summer School of Logic, Language and Information. ESSLLI 2010. UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN / DENMARK / AUGUST 9-20, 2010. http://esslli2010cph.info/.
Teaching
  • Winter Semester 2009-2010. Practical sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.
  • Summer Semester 2010. Practical sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.
  • Winter Semester 2010-2011. Practical Sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.

Presentations
  • A number of talks at international events among which EDOC, APCCM, BPSC, ECOWS, CEC, GRCIS, SBPM.
  • Number of guest talks at universities: University of Ghent, Universita degli studi di Torino, University of Osnabrueck, Queensland University of Technology (jointly organized by NICTA & University of Queensland).

Scientific Stays and Summer Schools

  • Scientific stays at the universities of Osnabrueck, Gent, Torino and at NICTA (Australia).
  • Summer schools 1st and 2nd Domain specific modeling summer school in 2010 and 2011, ESSLLI (Logic, Language, Information) in 2010.

Projects

I am currently involved in the following projects:
  • MARCO (Managing Regulatory Compliance: a Business Centered Approach): http://marco.gforge.uni.lu/. This projects is funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche du Luxembourg (FNR).
I was previously involved in the following projects:
  • ADIWA (Allianz Digitaler Warenfkuss): http://www.adiwa.net/
  • IP-SUPER (Integrated Project - semantics utilized for process management within and between enterprises): http://www.ip-super.org/

Manifesto

My name is Marwane El Kharbili. I am currently a junior researcher at the university of Luxemburg, where I am enrolled as a PhD Candidate. I am a member of the Model Driven Engineering Group of Prof. Pierre Kelsen.

This is my personal blog and it covers various topics related or not to my research interests (Business Process Management, Compliance Management, Model Driven Engineering, Business Rules Management, and the semantic web).

The opinions on this blog are not all necessarily mine and definitely not those of my employer.

Contact

Address
Marwane El Kharbili
Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication
6, Rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359, Luxembourg City
Luxemburg

Office: Campus Kirchberg, L-109
Tel: (+352) 46 66 44 5601
E-mail: marwane (DOT) elkharbili (AT) gmail (DOT) com
Skype ID: Ask me per email and I'll send it to you
LinkedIn: My profile on LinkedIn

Xing: My profile on Xing
Viadeo My profile on Viadeo

Apr 15, 2008

I am an evening man

On this website, I have found an article about the two different kinds of people. There are morning people and evening people. The page introduces these and contains three curves. One curve showing the medium performance curve (for the hypothetic "normal" person), the performance curve for an evening man, and a curve for the morning man. The evening man reaches his peak of productivity at around 22:00 O'Clock! The morning man on the opposite at around 08:00 O'clock. Somehow, this doesn't surprise me at all...

So the website advises the following to the evening man. Important and complicated tasks should be done during afternoon. The peak of productivity being between 14:00 and 18:00 at around 16:00. Routine tasks should be done in the morning, to get started. complex tasks should be always prepared the day before, during the evening. I already came up to the point where I put most of these tips in use, since I had to cope and find ways of optimizing with my unorthodox working methods since high school.

A morning man should be at work pretty early and profit from the time where most colleagues are not yet there to do complicated tasks. I know of some colleagues I had in the numerous companies I worked in (in several countries) who come to work before seven. The only question I have is how do they do with children, do they drop them at school at 06:30? Routine tasks should be done during the afternoon. The morning man has an overall decreasing productivity curve over the whole day. The earlier the better for him. Towards mid-afternoon, it is the end, he'd better go home :D

So I am clearly an evening man. This explains quite a lot of things to me. For example, my strong tendency to stay late at night is shown on the graphic. my only questions is where did they get the figures from? I would be very curious to know the whereabouts of the study. That could help a lot of people.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Apr 11, 2008

Drools - Business Rules the JBOSS way

I have been hearing about drools for quite time now, at least since 2 years. At the JBOSS JBOSSWorld conference in the US in mid-february in Orlando. Drools is the business rule management system (BRMS) from JBOSS. The contained rules engine is an implementation of the RETE algortihm. I am curious to know what their approach to business rules is. This is why I got started a little bit with the documentation to understand their user interaction strategy.

All I know is that Drools is rather destined to outsource business rules from java code. This is a pretty targeted use of business rules. But this makes sense since drools works on J2EE application servers (rules can be pulled from drools directly into the application). Drools uses the Google Web Toolkit and is free to download under the Apache license. My view on business rules is the following: rules exist on very different layers of the enterprise. Rules are inherently pervasive. for example, business rules can be modeled to describe business decision making patterns for a company routing electricity over a network of cable spanning the whole country. But rules can also be used to contain the parametrization logic of the application implementing this routing, potentially written in a target programing language. so both sets of business rules are needed. business rules have got to be modeled in both cases. The first set of business rules should be destiined to contain implementation-independent logic, and can capture rules on a business lelel. This is why I call these business rules. the other set of rules are implementation specific, and are destined to be modeled and integrated by the programmer, This is why i think they should be simply called rules. Now I am curious about what the components of drools are and what it would allow to do.

I am going to write some future posts about that as I will be discovering more about that. Hopefully some interesting ideas will come out of that.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Apr 8, 2008

Agile BPM

I found this post in a Dialog blog. Dialog conference series are organized by ILOG, of course tackle everything around Business Rule Management Systems. The post is about making BPM agile. The answer is: BPM, BRMS, SOA, Events Management. How? Well, Daryl Plummer, Vice President and Chief Gartner Fellow gave a talk about just that at Dialog08. I found the following points very interesting. A more dynamic BPM will have an effect on the following points:
  • Business agility
  • Decision making
  • Revenue opportunities
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Regulatory compliance
I find the second and last extremely interesting since hey form the core of my work at the IDS and my topic of research. It is true that managing decision making independently from where it is used, but also being able to modify and deploy it into business processes where the business is realized brings agility to the enterprise. Regulatory compliance is also a bog concern at companies currently, and even late adopters are now starting to explore ways of achieving that because they have to comply to laws and regulations in order to avoid judiciary pursuits or trials.
A second interesting though was that SOA is IT driven and BPM business-led. It is not about aligning IT to business, it is about integrating both, make sure they work together. So there is a need for a process-centric layer between both. This is what tools like ARIS are all about. Providing a comprehensive framework for managing business processes, while helping the implementation of these business processes.

The third idea was about events and services. Apart from the fact that consuming services is the natural way humans handle things. Nobody is interested in how a service is realized. A service is just the abstract interface to an value-adding functionality. Now the things is that services are made to be executed upon occuring events. Events and services just fit well. A services architecture integrated with an event management framework is another component in achieving flexibility. I have usually always heard of CEPs, Complex Event Processing frameworks, and how well they would work with business rules. There are vendors for CEPs and looking at what it may bring to a enterprise in terms of flexibility is certainly worth it. Now any process modelling notations such as EPC and BPMN handle events. So there is already event information that can ba managed by the business. so just like business rules, events are present at the different layers of an enterprise's business.

So three ideas about BPM agility out of a post at a BRMS conference. BPM, Services, events and business rules can all work together. We just have to show that in rea world use cases and complex scenarios, I would be very happy to write apost about someone who goves a presentation about such a thing.

Anyways, I have been reading some of the posts at DIALOG08 and many are very interesting. I'll keep on reviewing whatever has to do with BRMS, BPM, SOA and compliance.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Apr 2, 2008

Microsoft and the future of quantum computing

...Is the 1st April joke by Microsoft folks on Channel 9. And when you have a look at the reactions and the comments, many people have fallen down for this :D I must say, hadn't it been the comments, I would have believed that a team of genius software architects and astrophysicists have gotten together under the umbrella of the "Quantum Unreality Computation Group" and developed the revolutionary Quark product. This product is the ultimate quantum computing machine, the solution everybody dreamed of to revolutionize parallel computing. Don't look for this one on Microsoft's catalogs, you won't find it. the only thing that betrays the prank is that at the end of the 30 minute video where Dr. Beckman very handily explains the quantum theory behind the discovery, both the reporter and him eventually finish laughing their heart out, lol. If you want to get a not so serious idea about how quantum jokes made by Microsoft look like, get the video!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business rules, COBOL and Mainframes

Ilog have announced their new Cobol Add-On for Jrules, on the 19.02.2008. I read 2 posts about this here and here too. It should simplify SOA governance for legacy systems. It is destined to be used with legacy systems and in particular mainframe systems upon which applications are coded in COBOL. No need to say that finding programmers which still have much experience in COBOL is no easy task, and maintaining these applications is getting harder. But for companies that have invested much in these mainframe systems, the question of leaving these systems behind doesn't even pose itself. using the COBOL add-on for JRules is a way of outsourcing the business Rules embedded in theses mainframes to manage them. This also allows an SOA integration of these systems by invoking COBOL code through the business rules. COBOL code can also be generated from business rules. So quite an interesting application of business rules to legacy systems. I had heard a webcast by the guys from Corticon about how to realize such a legacy modernization and they were tackling the same topic. So it looks like business rules management system providers see this field of legacy systems as a very important one to their expansion strategy.

Marwane El Kharbili.