Understanding the Costs of Business Process Management Technology

Providing effective IT support for business processes has become crucial for enterprises to stay competitive in their market. Business processes must be defined, configured, implemented, enacted, monitored and continuously adapted to changing situations. Process life cycle support and continuous process improvement have therefore become critical success factors in enterprise computing. In response to this need, a variety of process support paradigms, process specification standards, process management tools, and supporting methods have emerged. Summarized under the term Business Process Management (BPM), they have become a success-critical instrument for improving overall business performance. However, introducing BPM approaches in enterprises is associated with significant costs. Though existing economic-driven IT evaluation and software cost estimation approaches have received considerable attention during the last decades, it is difficult to apply them to BPM projects. In particular, they are unable to take into account the dynamic evolution of BPM projects caused by the numerous technological, organizational and project-specific factors influencing them. The latter, in turn, often lead to complex and unexpected cost effects in BPM projects making even rough cost estimations a challenge. What is needed is a comprehensive approach enabling BPM professionals to systematically investigate the costs of BPM projects. This chapter takes a look at both known and often unknown cost factors in BPM projects, shortly discusses existing IT evaluation and software cost estimation approaches with respect to their suitability for BPM projects, and finally introduces the EcoPOST framework. EcoPOST utilizes evaluation models to describe the interplay of technological, organizational, and project-specific BPM cost factors as well as simulation concepts to unfold the dynamic behavior and costs of BPM projects

Modeling and Simulating Causal Dependencies on Process-aware Information Systems from a Cost Perspective

Providing effective IT support for business processes has become crucial for enterprises to stay competitive in their market. Business processes must be defined, implemented, enacted, monitored, and continuously adapted to changing situations. Process life cycle support and continuous process improvement become critical success factors in contemporary and future enterprise computing. In this context, process-aware information systems (PAISs) adopt a key role. Thereby, organization-specific and generic process support systems are distinguished. In the former case, the PAIS is build "from scratch" and incorporates organization-specific information about the structure and processes to be supported. In the latter case, the PAIS does not contain any information about the structure and processes of a particular organization. Instead, an organization needs to configure the PAIS by specifying processes, organizational entities, and business objects. To enable the realization of PAISs, numerous process support paradigms, process modeling standards, and business process management tools have been introduced. The application of these approaches in PAIS engineering projects is not only influenced by technological, but also by organizational and project-specific factors. Between these factors there exist numerous causal dependencies, which, in turn, often lead to complex and unexpected effects in PAIS engineering projects. In particular, the costs of PAIS engineering projects are significantly influenced by these causal dependencies. What is therefore needed is a comprehensive approach enabling PAIS engineers to systematically investigate these causal dependencies as well as their impact on the costs of PAIS engineering projects. Existing economic-driven IT evaluation and software cost estimation approaches, however, are unable to take into account causal dependencies and resulting effects. In response, this thesis introduces the EcoPOST framework. This framework utilizes evaluation models to describe the interplay of technological, organizational, and project-specific evaluation factors, and simulation concepts to unfold the dynamic behavior of PAIS engineering projects. In this context, the EcoPOST framework also supports the reuse of evaluation models based on a library of generic, predefined evaluation patterns and also provides governing guidelines (e.g., model design guidelines) which enhance the transfer of the EcoPOST framework into practice. Tool support is available as well. Finally, we present the results of two online surveys, three case studies, and one controlled software experiment. Based on these empirical and experimental research activities, we are able to validate evaluation concepts underlying the EcoPOST framework and additionally demonstrate its practical applicability

Creation dependencies of evolutionary artefact and design process knowledge

As design progresses, artefact and process knowledge often evolve together. However, there is very limited knowledge on the true nature of the dependencies between these two elements of knowledge. This paper presents the first attempt to clearly define 'creation' dependencies, which cause a change in design knowledge. Three data analyses were used to identify the dependencies: two were in-depth protocol analyses of a single student product design project and a senior ship designer’s daily work, and a third was a quantitative questionnaire analysis involving seven experienced complex system designers from industry. The analyses revealed a set of 52 previously unknown creation dependencies between artefact and design process knowledge with commonality found in only 5, with additional dependencies being identified that were specific to the design being studied. Different frequencies of dependency occurrence and particular dependency loops were identified. In addition, the importance and role of domain knowledge were explicitly revealed. The described research highlights the need for further work to provide a more comprehensive definition of the nature of evolutionary artefact and design process knowledge dependencies. Identification of these dependencies offers a significant opportunity to develop tools and techniques with an enhanced ability to support 'what–if' analyses during design

Concepts of change propagation analysis in engineering design

Interest in change propagation analysis for engineering design has increased rapidly since the topic gained prominence in the late 1990s. Although there are now many approaches and models, there is a smaller number of underlying key concepts. This article contributes a literature review and organising framework that summarises and relates these key concepts. Approaches that have been taken to address each key concept are collected and discussed. A visual analysis of the literature is presented to uncover some trends and gaps. The article thereby provides a thematic analysis of state-of-the-art in design change propagation analysis, and highlights opportunities for further work