Business Process Quality Management

During the past 25 years, research in the field of business process management as well as the practical adoption of corresponding methods and tools have made substantial progress. In particular, this development was driven by the insight that well-managed business processes enable organizations to better serve their stakeholders, save costs and, ultimately, realize competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising that improving business processes ranks high on the list of priorities of organizations. In practice, this challenge is currently being addressed through approaches such as benchmarking, industry-specific best practice reference models or process reengineering heuristics. However, no systematic and generic proposition towards managing business process quality has achieved broad acceptance yet. To address this gap, this thesis contributes to the field of business process quality management with the results lined out in the following. First, it defines a concise notion of business process quality based on organizational targets, and applies it to a sample real-world case. This definition is not specific to any particular application field, and thus constitutes a vital first step towards systematic and generic business process quality management. On that basis, an approach is developed to model business objectives in the sense of the requirements that shall be fulfilled by the results of a business process. In turn, this approach enables appraising if a business process achieves its business objective as one of the core criteria relevant to business process quality. Further, this thesis proposes extensions to common business process meta-models which enable quality-aware business process modeling, and demonstrates how fundamental quality characteristics can be derived from corresponding models. At this stage, the results achieved have enabled an advanced understanding of business process quality. By means of these insights, a model of business process quality attributes with corresponding quality criteria is developed. This model complements and exceeds preceding approaches since, for the first time, it systematically derives relevant quality attributes from a business process management perspective instead of adopting these from related fields. It enables appraising business process quality independently of a particular field of application, and deriving recommendations to improve the processes assessed. To enable practical adoption of the concepts developed, the integration of procedures and functionality relevant to quality in business process management lifecycles and system landscapes is discussed next. To establish the contribution of this thesis beyond the previous state of the art, the proposed quality model is then compared to existing business process reengineering practices as well as propositions in the area of business process quality. Further, quality attributes are employed to improve a substantial real-world business process. This experience report demonstrates how quality management practices can be applied even if quality-aware system landscapes are not in place yet. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between the research results proposed in this thesis and the conditions present in practice today. Finally, remaining limitations with regard to the research objectives pursued are discussed, and challenges for future research are lined out. Addressing the latter will enable further leveraging the potentials of business process quality management

A Model-Driven Approach for Business Process Management

The Business Process Management is a common mechanism recommended by a high number of standards for the management of companies and organizations. In software companies this practice is every day more accepted and companies have to assume it, if they want to be competitive. However, the effective definition of these processes and mainly their maintenance and execution are not always easy tasks. This paper presents an approach based on the Model-Driven paradigm for Business Process Management in software companies. This solution offers a suitable mechanism that was implemented successfully in different companies with a tool case named NDTQ-Framework.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2010-20057-C03-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

Model-driven Enterprise Systems Configuration

Enterprise Systems potentially lead to significant efficiency gains but require a well-conducted configuration process. A promising idea to manage and simplify the configuration process is based on the premise of using reference models for this task. Our paper continues along this idea and delivers a two-fold contribution: first, we present a generic process for the task of model-driven Enterprise Systems configuration including the steps of (a) Specification of configurable reference models, (b) Configuration of configurable reference models, (c) Transformation of configured reference models to regular build time models, (d) Deployment of the generated build time models, (e) Controlling of implementation models to provide input to the configuration, and (f) Consolidation of implementation models to provide input to reference model specification. We discuss inputs and outputs as well as the involvement of different roles and validation mechanisms. Second, we present an instantiation case of this generic process for Enterprise Systems configuration based on Configurable EPCs

An ontological approach for recovering legacy business content

Legacy Information Systems (LIS) pose a challenge for many organizations. On one hand, LIS are viewed as aging systems needing replacement; on the other hand, years of accumulated business knowledge have made these systems mission-critical. Current approaches however are often criticized for being overtly dependent on technology and ignoring the business knowledge which resides within LIS. In this light, this paper proposes a means of capturing the business knowledge in a technology agnostic manner and transforming it in a way that reaps the benefits of clear semantic expression - this transformation is achieved via the careful use of ontology. The approach called Content Sophistication (CS) aims to provide a model of the business that more closely adheres to the semantics and relationships of objects existing in the real world. The approach is illustrated via an example taken from a case study concerning the renovation of a large financial system and the outcome of the approach results in technology agnostic models that show improvements along several dimensions

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Applying MDE tools to defining domain specific languages for model management

In the model driven engineering (MDE), modeling languages play a central role. They range from the most generic languages such as UML, to more individual ones, called domain-specific modeling languages (DSML). These languages are used to create and manage models and must accompany them throughout their life cycle and evolution. In this paper we propose a domain-specific language for model management, to facilitate the user's task, developed with techniques and tools used in the MDE paradigm.Fil: Pérez, Gabriela. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Irazábal, Jerónimo. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Pons, Claudia Fabiana. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Giandini, Roxana Silvia. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentin

Hybrid process modelling within business process management projects

Business Process Management (BPM) is still an important research topic amongst both academics and businesses. The recent recession has forced businesses to focus on cost control and efficiency in order to better cope with the economic downturn. Many companies in this situation turn to BPM software as a means of improving their efficiency and costs by reducing aspects of the business such as process lead-times and material costs. In order to identify areas of the business and its processes which require changing the business will most likely adopt a method of modelling their business processes. Because of the large number of available techniques decision makers usually struggle to decide the best approach. Recent literature has also pointed out that prevalent modelling techniques are designed to serve one specific purpose and may not be capable of modelling the whole picture. The key relationship between the information systems and the human behaviour is one example of where existing techniques are biased towards opposite ends of the scale. This paper proposes the use of a hybrid modelling notation composed of multiple existing notations in order to bridge this. The hybrid notation was applied to a BPM project at a company in the construction industry and a case study conducted with its users

Actor perception in business use case modeling

Mainstream literature recognizes the validity and effectiveness of use cases as a technique for gathering and capturing system requirements. Use cases represent the driver of various modern development methods, mainly of object-oriented extraction, such as the Unified Process. Although the adoption of use cases proliferated in the context of software systems development, they are not as extensively employed in business modeling . The concept of business use case is not a novelty, but only recently did it begin to re-circulate in the literature and in case tools. This paper examines the issues involved in adopting business use cases for capturing the functionality of an organization and proposes guidelines for their identification, packaging, and mapping to system use cases. The proposed guidelines are based on the principle of actor perception described in the paper. The application of this principle is exemplified with a worked example aimed at demonstrating the utility of the proposed guidelines and at clarifying the application of the principle of actor perception. The worked example is based on a series of workshops run at a major UK financial institution

A quality management based on the Quality Model life cycle

Managing quality is a hard and expensive task that involves the execution and control of processes and techniques. For a good quality management, it is important to know the current state and the objective to be achieved. It is essential to take into account with a Quality Model that specifies the purposes of managing quality. QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework) is a framework to manage quality in MDWE (Model-driven Web Engineering). This paper suggests managing quality but pointing out the Quality Model life cycle. The purpose is to converge toward a quality continuous improvement by means of reducing effort and time.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2010-20057-C03-02Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN 2010-12312-EJunta de Andalucía TIC-578