Resinas Arias de Reyna, Manuel

Ruiz Cortés, Antonio

Río Ortega, Adela del

idUS. Depósito de Investigación Universidad de Sevilla

Summary Of “Defining Process PerformanceIndicators: An Ontological Approach” [1]A. del-R´ıo-Ortega, M. Resinas, and A. Ruiz-Corte´sUniversidad de Sevilla, SpainBusiness Process Management (BPM) intends to support business processesusing methods, techniques, and software to design, enact, control, and analyseoperational processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documentsand other sources of information [2]. Many companies are taking this processoriented perspective in their business, as a way of identifying how to improve,where to increase quality, reduce waste or save time in their processes, makingthus the evaluation of business processes performance a key aspect.Performance requirements on business processes can be specified by means ofProcess Performance Indicators (PPIs) with target values that must be reachedin a certain period. A PPI is a measure that reflects the critical success factorsof a business process defined within an organisation, in which its target valuereflects the objectives pursued by the organization with that business process.In this paper, we argue the importance of integrating the management ofPPIs into the whole business process lifecycle [3, 4] and propose to do it as fol-lows: in the design and analysis phase, PPIs should be modelled together withthe business process. Furthermore, this model of PPIs should also enable theiranalysis by detecting the dependencies amongst them at design time and alsousing them as part of the business process analysis, for instance in business pro-cess simulation techniques. During the configuration phase, the instrumentationof the processes that are necessary to take the measures must be defined. Duringthe business process enactment, when valuable execution data is gathered, thePPIs’ values have to be calculated and the monitoring of these PPIs should becarried out. For instance, this can be done based on execution logs that storeinformation about the process such as the start or end of activities. Finally, dur-ing the evaluation phase, the monitoring information obtained in the previousphase will help to identify correlations and predict future behaviour.Handling business processes and the aforementioned PPIs lifecycle is rec-ognized as an error-prone and time-consuming activity which requires of auto-mated support. Current research efforts in the automated treatment of businessprocesses mainly focus on the analysis post-mortem applying technics as pro-cess mining. These operations allow us to observe the properties of the processmodels and extract information about them after their enactment. However, al-though there are several research proposals to define PPIs, none of them arewell-suited because they cannot express commonly used PPIs or they are notready to enable a design-time analysis of PPIs or they do not define explicitlytheir relationship with the business process and, hence, make it difficult theiruse together with business process analysis techniques. Thus, the definition andautomated design-time analysis of these PPIs still prevail as open research issues.To overcome this issue, we present an ontology to define PPIs whose mainbenefits can be summarised as follows: 1. The relation between PPIs and thebusiness process is explicitly established. This enables the use of PPIs togetherwith other business process analysis techniques and helps in the instrumentationof the information systems that is necessary to obtain measures automatically.2. It supports the definition of a wide variety of PPIs, including those associatedwith data objects. It also supports the definition of an expressive analysis periodof a PPI. In fact, our ontology supports the definition of PPIs that, as far aswe know, cannot be expressed in any other similar proposal. 3. Dependenciesbetween ProcessMeasures and InstanceMeasures can be automatically obtainedfrom the ontology, which enables the analysis of PPIs at design time. Further-more, since the ontology has been defined in OWL DL, automated reasonerscan be used to make queries about the PPI model such as how many PPIs aredefined on the same MeasureDefinition? Or how many PPIs are defined on aTimeMeasure?Furthermore, we have validated the suitability of the ontology for the defi-nition of real PPIs by using several real scenarios in different environments (theInformation Technology Department of the Andalusian Health Service and theJustice and Public Administration Department of the Andalusian Local Gov-ernment), in order to prove the applicability of our solution to actual scenarios.These real scenarios and the corresponding definitions of PPIs using our ontologycan be found at http://www.isa.us.es/ppiontology/References1. del R´ıo-Ortega, A., Resinas, M., Ruiz-Corte´s, A.: Defining Process PerformanceIndicators: An Ontological Approach. In Proceedings of the 18th InternationalConference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), OTM 2010, Part I,LNCS 6426, 555-572 (2010)2. van der Aalst, W., ter Hofstede, A.,Weske, M.: Business process management: Asurvey. In: Business Process management. Volume 2678, Springer (2003) 1–123. Weske, M.: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures.Springer (2007)4. del R´ıo-Ortega, A., Resinas, M., Ruiz-Corte´s, A.: Towards modelling and tracingkey performance indicators in business processes. In: II Taller sobre Procesos deNegocio e Ingenier´ıa de Servicios (PNIS 2009). (2009)

Summary of Defining Process Performance Indicators: an Ontological Approach

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Summary of Defining Process Performance Indicators: an Ontological Approach

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