Analyzing the ripple effects of change in business process models

Abstract

Change management is a critical task to control the side effects of a modification during the business process evolution. The evolution of business processes is an essential activity for the companies to better fulfill the requirements of their customers and different stakeholders. In this respect, the enterprises should adopt an effective mechanism in order to achieve the flexible business process models. It is important to identify and highlight the ripple effects of a change for minimizing their impact on other parts or entities of the system and associated services. This paper proposes a dependency-centric approach for change impact analysis. We attempt to demonstrate the change impact propagation in business process models by detecting and analyzing the interdependencies among all parts of business processes along with associated services. It can support the maintenance and evolution of business process models. The major objective is to help the modelers and business experts to assess the associated risk of intended changes and estimate the effort required for their accomplishments.

Impact analysis and change propagation in service-oriented enterprises: A systematic review

“…For business process changes, a basic change impact metric [85] tries to quantify the impact of proposed changes. Priority, execution frequency and invocation frequency metrics have been used by [30] to calculate impact weighted factor (IWF) for dependencies between business processes and service layer entities. A set of three metrics by [59] tries to quantify the impact of evolutionary change to the trust of composite services.…”

“…Business process changes can be categorized mainly into process schema evolution and process instance changes [30,80]. Process schema evolution represents higher level changes in process models.…”

“…Role dependencies refer to different roles that execute process activities. A taxonomy of dependencies in business process models classify them as structural, semantic, direct and indirect dependencies that have significance for change impact analysis [30]. Structural dependencies are syntactic dependencies among two entities of business process models, i.e.…”

“…Inter-process change management has received significant attention from the research community. Existing research provides a sound basis for change propagation [13,16,36,43,51,81], dependency analysis [7,8,10,12,30,31,36,45] and traceability analysis [22,25,71] for business process level changes. Most CIA approaches for inter-process impact analysis utilize graphbased or formal specification approaches for dependency analysis.…”

Formulating optimal business process change decisions using a computational hierarchical change management structure framework

“…Optimal BPC implementation is based on a well-structured formulation of decision-making (Guha et al , 1997; Harmon, 2015; Jurisch et al , 2016; Vanhoenacker et al , 1999). However, contemporary organisations are encountering BPC challenges in public sectors because of the complex intra and inter-organisational relationships that trigger ripple effects, chaotic business system behaviour (Gong and Janssen, 2017; Kherbouche et al , 2013; Luftman et al , 1993; Snowden and Boone, 2007), decision-making biases and other anomalies (Grover and Otim, 2009; Harmon, 2010; Jurisch, 2014; Jurisch et al , 2013). In the business context, ripple effects are explained as the collision between outcomes of activities in one system or process, prompting impacts to one or more related processes or systems (Lee, 1998; Luftman et al , 1993; Yau et al , 1978).…”