An important aspect in the business process lifecycle is the evaluation of business processes performance, since it helps organisations to de- fine and measure progress towards their goals. Performance requirements on business processes can be specified by means of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs), as suggested in many methodologies and frameworks like, for instance, COBIT, ITIL or EFQM. As a consequence, it is convenient to integrate the management of PPIs into the whole business process lifecycle from its design to its evaluation, enabling thus a more effective an effi- cient automated support to extract information from such indicators. in this paper, we analyse some approaches related to this issue and identify the challenges that need to be faced

Resinas Arias de Reyna, Manuel

Ruiz Cortés, Antonio

Río Ortega, Adela del

idUS. Depósito de Investigación Universidad de Sevilla

Challenges To Support A PPI Management Lifecycle∗Adela del-Río-Ortega Manuel Resinas Antonio Ruiz-CortésETS Ingeniería Informática ETS Ingeniería Informática ETS Ingeniería InformáticaUniv. de Sevilla Univ. de Sevilla Univ. de Sevillaadeladelrio@us.es resinas@us.es aruiz@us.esAbstractAn important aspect in the business processlifecycle is the evaluation of business processesperformance, since it helps organisations to de-fine and measure progress towards their goals.Performance requirements on business pro-cesses can be specified by means of ProcessPerformance Indicators (PPIs), as suggestedin many methodologies and frameworks like,for instance, COBIT, ITIL or EFQM. As aconsequence, it is convenient to integrate themanagement of PPIs into the whole businessprocess lifecycle from its design to its evalu-ation, enabling thus a more eﬀective an eﬃ-cient automated support to extract informa-tion from such indicators. In this paper, weanalyse some approaches related to this issueand identify the challenges that need to befaced.1 IntroductionIt is increasingly important to evaluate theperformance of business processes. A keyinstrument to carry out this evaluation isby means of Process Performance Indicators(PPIs). A PPI is a measure that reflects thecritical success factors of a business processdefined within an organisation, in which itstarget value must be reached in a certain pe-riod and reflects the objectives pursued by theorganisation with that business process. Notethat we use PPI as a kind of Key Performance∗This work has been partially supported bythe European Commission (FEDER), and SETI(TIN2009-07366); and project P07-TIC-2533 fundedby the Andalusian local Government.! "#$%&'()*+$%'#$$),-./#$$)01#'2%3%/42%.')4'1)5.1#66%'&! 7'468$%$()946%142%.':);%<+642%.')4'1)9#-%3%/42%.'! ,-./#$$)5%'%'&)4'1)*75=>46+42%.'"#$%&')4'1)7'468$%$! ;8$2#<)$#6#/2%.':)0<?6#<#'242%.')4'1)@#$2)4'1)"#?6.8<#'2! A?#-42%.':)5.'%2.-%'&)4'1)54%'2#'4'/#B.'3%&+-42%.'='4/2<#'2Figure 1: Business Process Lifecycle as describedin [4]Indicator (KPI) that focuses exclusively onthe indicators defined on the business pro-cesses. Nowadays, many methodologies andframeworks like, for instance, COBIT, ITIL orthe EFQM excellence model [1, 2, 3], confirmthis importance by including the definition ofthese PPIs within their recommendations asa means to evaluate the performance of theexisting business processes. In order to makethis evaluation of business processes easier, itis convenient to integrate the management ofPPIs into the whole business process lifecy-cle. In [4], the four-phase business processlifecycle of Figure 1 is proposed. This lifecyclestarts with the Design and analysis phase, inwhich business processes are identified, mod-elled using a particular notation, validated tocheck whether all valid process instances arereflected by its corresponding business processmodel, simulated to detect possible undesiredActas de los Talleres de las Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2010ISSN 1988-3455 SISTEDES, 2010 8execution sequences, and verified. Once thebusiness process model is designed and veri-fied, it needs to be implemented. This is doneduring the configuration phase, where, in casea dedicated software system is needed, it mustbe selected and configured in order to take intoaccount the interactions of the employees withthe system and the integration with existingsoftware systems. Then, the implementationof business process needs to be tested and fi-nally deployed in its target environment. Nextphase is the enactment, that encompasses therun time of the business process. On the onehand, a correct orchestration is necessary forthe business activities to be performed accord-ing to the business process’s execution con-straints. On the other hand, process moni-toring is a good mechanism for providing in-formation about the status of business processinstances. Finally, the evaluation phase usesinformation available to evaluate and improvebusiness process models and their implemen-tations. Note that there not exists a stricttemporal ordering in which these phases needto be executed; incremental and evolutionaryapproaches involving concurrent activities inmultiple phases are, thus, common. In this pa-per, we are interested in describing what hasbeen done in the literature regarding the in-tegration of PPIs as first-class citizens in thisbusiness process lifecycle, and in outlining theopen challenges this issue presents.The remainder of this paper is organised asfollows. In Section 2 we explain how to inte-grate PPIs into the business process manage-ment lifecycle and analyse how diﬀerent ap-proaches deal with this issue. From this sec-tion, a number of open research questions areidentified and presented in Section 3. Finally,Section 4 draws the conclusions from our work,summarizes the paper and outlines our futurework.2 Integrating PPIs Into The Busi-ness Process Management Lifecy-cleIn order to make the evaluation of the perfor-mance of business processes easier, it is con-venient to integrate the management of PPIsinto the whole business process lifecycle. Inthis section, we take the business process life-cycle presented by Weske in [4, 5] as a refer-ence and we describe how management of PPIscan be integrated into this lifecycle. Further-more, we also report on several proposals thatcan be used to support this integration.2.1 Design and AnalysisIn the design and analysis phase, PPIs shouldbe modelled together with the business pro-cess. Furthermore, this model of PPIs shouldalso enable their analysis by detecting the de-pendencies amongst them at design time andalso using them as part of the business pro-cess analysis, for instance in business processsimulation techniques.With respect to this phase, several authorshave presented some approaches: Pedrinaci etal. present in [9] a metric ontology to al-low the definition and computation of met-rics. Popova et al. [13] present a framework formodeling performance indicators within a gen-eral organisation modeling framework. Theydefine indicators by assigning values to a setof attributes. In [23], they point out the waythese indicators are calculated and define re-lations between PPIs and the processes. Rela-tionships between PPIs (causality, correlationand aggregation) are briefly introduced in [13]and explained in detail in [23]. They alsodefine temporal properties over PPIs (calledPI expressions) in [24]. Wetzstein et al. de-scribe in [20] a KPI ontology using WSML tospecify KPIs over semantic business processes.In [15] Mayerl et al. discuss how to derive met-ric dependency definitions from functional de-pendencies by applying dependency patterns.Castellanos et al. present in [18] the IBOMplatform, that allows, among other things, todefine business measures. The user can definebusiness measures (through a GUI) to measurecharacteristics of process instances, processes,resources or of the overall business operations.Specifically, they characterize metrics throughfour attributes: name (unique), target entity(objet to be measured), data type (numeric,boolean, taxonomy or SLA) and desirable met-Actas de los Talleres de las Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2010ISSN 1988-3455 SISTEDES, 2010 9ric values. This approach is not focused onbusiness processes but on the whole organisa-tion.2.2 ConfigurationDuring the configuration phase, the instru-mentation of the processes that are necessaryto take the measures must be defined.Momm et al. present in [19] a meta-modelfor the specification of the PPI monitoringalong with an extension of the BPMN meta-model for modeling the required instrumen-tation for the monitoring and an outline ofmethodology for an automated generation ofthis instrumentation.This approach explainshow to define a KPI and how to take the mea-sures.2.3 EnactmentDuring the business process enactment, whenvaluable execution data is gathered, the PPIs’values have to be calculated and the monitor-ing of these PPIs should be carried out. Forinstance, this can be done based on executionlogs that store information about the processsuch as the start or the end of activities.To overcome this issue, Pedrinaci et al.present in [9] a Semantic Business ProcessMonitoring Tool called SENTINEL. This toolcan support automated reasoning. Popova etal. propose in [23] formal techniques for anal-ysis of executions of organizational scenarios.Wetzstein et al. introduce in [20] a frameworkfor BAM as part of the semantic business pro-cess management, where PPI models are au-tomatically converted to IT-level event-basedmodels and used for real-time monitoring us-ing reasoning technology. In this framework,there is a monitor model that specifies howevents are processed to calculate KPIs, whosevalues are then published in dashboards2.4 EvaluationFinally, during the evaluation phase, the mon-itoring information obtained in the previousphase will help to identify correlations and pre-dict future behaviour.Castellanos et al. [18] address this issue,since their IBOM platform also allows to per-form intelligent analysis on business measuresto understand causes of undesired values andpredict future values.3 ChallengesAs can be deduced from Section 2, businessprocess lifecycle can benefit from the definitionof PPIs over processes and from a set of anal-ysis operations of them, enabling a more eﬀec-tive and eﬃcient automated support to extractinformation from such indicators.In order to obtain such benefit, there existsa number of research questions that are notanswered yet. In the following we state someof them:• Which information is necessary inorder to define Process PerformanceIndicators over business processes?How do these PPIs relate to thebusiness processes for which theywere defined?An appropriate definition of PPIs is keyto enable the automated support of theaforementioned PPIs lifecycle. Moreover,in order to be able to get information,not only from the indicators, but alsofrom the business processes they were de-fined for, it is important to define an ex-plicit connection between indicators andthe process elements they are measuring.There are several research proposals todefine PPIs, as presented in Section 2, butnone of them are well-suited because ei-ther there are commonly used PPIs thatcannot be defined with them or they arenot ready to enable a design-time analysisof PPIs. In Pedrinati et al.’s approach [9]it is not clear whether the defined met-rics are explicitly connected with the el-ements of a business process. Popova etal. [13] do not consider derived measureswhen defining indicators. Wetzstein etal. [20] do not take into account indica-tors related to data. Mayerl et al. [15] donot delve into the definition of measures,Actas de los Talleres de las Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2010ISSN 1988-3455 SISTEDES, 2010 10they only set the semantics of some ele-ments to consider when defining measuresbased on concepts of the CIM metricsmodel [16] (e.g. UnitOfWork, which re-lates metrics with functional entities) andthe QoS UML profile described in [17].Momm et al.’s metamodel for the specifi-cation of PPIs [19] lacks some propertiesidentified like, for instance, the analysisperiod of the PPI). Finally, Castellanos etal. [18], as far as we can deduce from thepaper, do not take into account during thedefinition of metrics some aspects such asthe analysis period, the unit of measureor the dimension to be measured.• Which analysis operations can beapplied to PPIs in order to getrelevant information about them?Which information can be gatheredfrom these PPIs’ definition?Making queries and extracting informa-tion from PPIs may be useful when defin-ing dashboards to monitor processes. Fur-thermore, the analysis of these PPIs atdesign-time can help to assure the defi-nition of achievable goals or even iden-tify conflicting goals. E.g. It could bedetected if two PPIs inversely dependentare being tried to be optimised. Anotherbenefit resulting from this analysis is thepossibility to find out how certain activityinfluences PPIs or vice versa.With respect to this challenge, there ex-ist some approaches [9, 23, 20, 18] thataddress the analysis of PPIs, but they doit in runtime, losing the aforementionedbenefits of this design-time analysis.• Which are the issues to considerwhen developing a suitable tool tosupport this automatic analysis ofprocess performance indicators?Explicit business process models ex-pressed in a graphical notation (such as,for instance, BPMN) ease communicationabout these processes, so that stakehold-ers can communicate eﬃciently, and re-fine and improve them. In the same way,it is convenient to develop a graphical no-tation to depict these PPIs together withthe corresponding business process mod-els. Thus, it is necessary to develop atool to support such a graphical notationof PPIs, as well as to enable their auto-mated analysis. Furthermore, it would bevery useful to integrate such a tool withan editor of business process diagrams.To the best of our knowledge, there notexists such a graphical notation nor thedescribed tool.4 Conclusions and Future WorkIn this paper, we argue the importance of in-tegrating the management of PPIs into thewhole business process lifecycle. Specifically,in the design and analysis phase, PPIs must bemodelled together with the business process.This model should enable (at design-time) anautomated or semi-automated analysis to, forinstance, detect the dependencies and poten-tial conflicts amongst them or to use themtogether with other business process analysistechniques such as simulation techniques. Wehave analysed how diﬀerent approaches ad-dress this issue and their shortcomings. Wehave also identified the challenges that needto be faced to this respect.Our future work focuses on finding answersto the open research questions presented inSection 3. In order to do so we have alreadystarted by defining an ontology for the defini-tion of PPIs (described in a paper submittedto the 18th International Conference on Co-operative Information Systems-CoopIS 2010),whose main benefits can be summarised as fol-lows:1. The relation between PPIs and the busi-ness process is explicitly established.2. It supports the definition of a wide va-riety of PPIs, including those associatedwith data objects. It also supports thedefinition of an expressive analysis periodof a PPIActas de los Talleres de las Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2010ISSN 1988-3455 SISTEDES, 2010 113. Dependencies between measures can beautomatically obtained from the ontology,which enables the analysis of PPIs at de-sign time. Furthermore, since the ontol-ogy has been defined in OWL DL, au-tomated reasoners can be used to makequeries about the PPI modelMoreover, we are extending this ontologicaldefinition with a textual language as closer tothe natural language as possible, in order toease this definition.With respect to the second point, we plan todefine a mechanism to make queries on PPIs(PPI-Q) similar to the one presented in [21] tomake queries on BPMN (BPMN-Q). We arealso working on describing mechanisms to de-rive restrictions (taking advantage from Con-straint Satisfaction Problems) between PPIs,in order to extract knowledge in an automaticway from the PPIs defined over a particularbusiness process.Finally, to overcome the third challenge, weare developing a graphical notation in orderto depict these ontological concepts of PPIsover business processes and we are also inte-grating this notation into the web-based editorORYX [22] as a result of a collaboration staywith the BPT group at the HPI Potsdam.References[1] ISACA: COBIT 4.1 (2009)[2] Ofice of Government Commerce: Infor-mation technology infrastructure library(ITIL) v3. Collection of books (2007)[3] European Foundation for Quality Man-agement: EFQM excellence model 2010[4] Weske, M.: Business Process Manage-ment: Concepts, Languages, Architec-tures. 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Challenges to Support  a Ppi Management Lifecycle

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Challenges to Support a Ppi Management Lifecycle

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