Several software vendors have started work on implementing the business artifact approach a couple of years ago. At IBM, "Project ArtiFact(TM)" is under way, which is focused on the use of business artifacts to provide a unifying foundation for the management of business operations and processes. IBM has made available two commercial offerings. One of them is called "Business Entities Lifecycle Analysis (BELA)", representing both methodology and tooling. BELA is intended as a vehicle whereby business analysts can create models of their business operations, which can then be transformed in a straightforward manner into implemented systems.

IBM's other offering based on the business artifacts approach is embedded within IBM's "Core Banking Transformation Solutions". It serves as a specific solution accelerator, particularly in the area of providing bundled retail banking services.

As such, IBM's business artifact approach is more business-oriented than the service-centric Websphere Business Services Fabric (WBSF), which provides an end-to-end SOA platform for composite business services. WBSF includes optional Industry Content Packs with industry reference models and pre-built SOA assets. It enables dynamic policy-driven business services assembly at design and execution time.

While IBM's offerings do not qualify as standalone DEMS suites, but are targeted at integration with existing execution environments, other software vendors have gone a step further and have developed composition-driven, model-driven and meta data-driven DEMS suites that feature executable business artifacts.

Some vendors have put the focus on tooling functionality rather than on providing a comprehensive generic business architecture model. Clearly, a generic business architecture model proves a differentiating factor, since it helps business users speed up business artifact modeling and composition.

The notion of a Dynamic Enterprise Management System (DEMS) is new. It helps realize enterprise life cycle management, which is the dynamic, iterative process of changing the enterprise over time. It represents a deliberate attempt to reconcile and combine multiple life cycle management processes (service life cycle management, process life cycle management, and other asset life cycle management categories) within a single, unified approach. The application of enterprise engineering processes, including the process of enterprise architecting. is a key driver for maximizing enterprise productivity, performance and efficiency in a holistic manner.

A DEMS is centered around the concept of business artifacts. A business artifact is a conceptual entity that combines an information model for the entity and a life cycle into a holistic unit, thus representing a blend of process and data, and effectively breaking the traditional separation between process and data. As such, a business artifact represents a basic building block from which models of business operations (which are described by business processes) are constructed. Business artifacts can be assembled to create artifact compositions of arbitrary complexity.

A DEMS suite would basically encompass a Composition Registry and Repository (CRR) and an Integrated Composition and Execution Environment (ICEE). Conceptually, a DEMS would represent a blend of a Business Process Management (BPM) software, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) software, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) software, Information Asset Management (IAM) software, and Business Semantics Management (BSM) software.

There is no unified classification of business process types. We differentiate between three basic business process types: Production workflow, case management, and integration-centric . The term "human-centric process" would represent a generalization of production workflow and case management.

Production workflow signifies processes in which the flow of activities is well-defined and based on business rules. With case management, users collaborate at run-time in a more ad hoc fashion. Processes are unstructured. Processes and activities (tasks) may be added to a case at run-time. Finally, integration-centric BPM means that the focus is on automation of processes that integrate applications and systems, but may also require human interaction. Integration-centric BPM relies on loosely coupled asynchronous connectivity, leveraging SOA middleware.

From a modeling-oriented viewpoint, there are two basic modeling types: procedural and goal-oriented. While the procedural approach is an entrenched modeling practice, goal-oriented modeling is fairly new, and still almost unknown to most persons engaged in process modeling.

With the procedural modeling approach, business processes are designed using process modeling languages, such as BPMN, that typically combine a procedural way of specifying the order of activities and an event-based model. Possible courses of action are defined at design time. The goal-oriented modeling approach is quite different. The overall process goal is broken down into a hierarchy of sub-goals, each of which encapsulates one or more rule-driven procedural processes. Additional sub-goals and associated processes may be added at run-time.

We do not claim that we have featured all products that qualify as DEMS. The above table reflects vendor responses to our questionnaire.