A comparative analysis of business process modelling techniques

Business process modelling is an increasingly popular research area for both organisations and academia due to its usefulness in facilitating human understanding and communication. Several modelling techniques have been proposed and used to capture the characteristics of business processes. However, available techniques view business processes from different perspectives and have different features and capabilities. Furthermore, to date limited guidelines exist for selecting appropriate modelling techniques based on the characteristics of the problem and its requirements. This paper presents a comparative analysis of some popular business process modelling techniques. The comparative framework is based on five criteria: flexibility, ease of use, understandability, simulation support and scope. The study highlights some of the major paradigmatic differences between the techniques. The proposed framework can serve as the basis for evaluating further modelling techniques and generating selection procedures

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

Identifying cognitive aspects to improve business process reengineering

Knowledge-intensive processes are widely used to recover from errors, handle exceptional cases and complaints, and to improve or adapt a process itself. In this context, evolved Business-Process Reengineering (BPR) techniques are changing to give some answers to this reality. In this paper, we identify some cognitive aspects used by traditional and recent reengineering models. We provide a framework highlighting how cognitive aspects might improve reengineering through knowledge and perception modelling.Eje: I - Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Base de DatosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

On Engineering Support for Business Process Modelling and Redesign

Currently, there is an enormous (research) interest in business process redesign (BPR). Several management-oriented approaches have been proposed showing how to make BPR work. However, detailed descriptions of empirical experience are few. Consistent engineering methodologies to aid and guide a BPR-practitioner are currently emerging. Often, these methodologies are claimed to be developed for business process modelling, but stem directly from information system design cultures. We consider an engineering methodology for BPR to consist of modelling concepts, their representation, computerized tools and methods, and pragmatic skills and guidelines for off-line modelling, communicating, analyzing, (re)designing\ud business processes. The modelling concepts form the architectural basis of such an engineering methodology. Therefore, the choice, understanding and precise definition of these concepts determine the productivity and effectiveness of modelling tasks within a BPR project. The\ud current paper contributes to engineering support for BPR. We work out general issues that play a role in the development of engineering support for BPR. Furthermore, we introduce an architectural framework for business process modelling and redesign. This framework consists of a coherent set of modelling concepts and techniques on how to use them. The framework enables the modelling of both the structural and dynamic characteristics of business processes. We illustrate its applicability by modelling a case from service industry. Moreover, the architectural framework supports abstraction and refinement techniques. The use of these techniques for a BPR trajectory are discussed

An Audience Centred Approach to Business Process Reengineering

This paper describes a method for process modelling which is designed to provide guidance to the business process modeller. The method has evolved from our experience of attempting to apply software process modelling approaches to business processes. A major influence on the method has been our observations that a pragmatic approach to notation selection is required in order to maintain a meaningful dialogue with end-users. Business process modelling methods typically fall into two camps. General methods attempt to describe the managerial activities which surround the modelling itself (Coulson-Thomas, 94; GISIP, 95). Specific methods, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on the details of a particular notational approach. However, as with programming languages or design methods, no single notational approach is best suited to all problems. Ideally, the process modeller should be able to incorporate the appropriate notational approach into some coherent generic modelling method.This paper addresses the needs of the modeller at the detailed level without prescribing a specific notation. This is achieved by describing categories of modelling activities which the modeller should undertake within process modelling, and suggesting how notations may be used within these categories. Our method is generally applicable, and is illustrated here by models of processes within the Construction industry

Extraction of objects from legacy systems: an example using cobol legacy systems

In the last few years the interest in legacy information system has increased because of the escalating resources spent on their maintenance. On the other hand, the importance of extracting knowledge from business rules is becoming a crucial issue for modern business: sometime, because of inappropriate documentation, this knowledge is essentially only stored in the code. A way to improve their use and maintainability in the present environment is to migrate them into a new hardware / software platform reusing as much of their experience as possible during this process. This migration process promotes the population of a repository of reusable software components for their reuse in the development of a new system in that application domain or in the later maintenance processes. The actual trend in the migration of a legacy information system, is to exploit the potentialities of object oriented technology as a natural extension of earlier structured programming techniques. This is done by decomposing the program into several agent-like modules communicating via message passing, and providing to this system some object oriented key features. The key step is the "object isolation", i.e. the isolation of .groups of routines and related data items : to candidates in order to implement an abstraction in the application domain. The main idea of the object isolation method presented here is to extract information from the data flow, to cluster all the procedures on the base of their data accesses. It will examine "how" a procedure accesses the data in order to distinguish several types of accesses and to permit a better understanding of the functionality of the candidate objects. These candidate modules support the population of a repository of reusable software components that might be used as a basis of the process of evolution leading to a new object oriented system reusing the extracted objects