Towards an Enterprise Business Process Architecture Standard

Abstract

An effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the practicality of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current "state-ofthe-art" in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics AbstractAn effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the practicality of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current "state-of-the-art" in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed.

Strategic Alignment of Business Processes

“…al. The precursor to [116] is described in [114] where Koliadis and Ghose introduce the notion of relating goals (functional goals -from an and/or decomposition tree) with the accumulated effects of processes. This article describes the fundamental relationship between goals and effects show-ing how processes are related to requirements.…”

“…al. [116] have proposed a framework for aligning business processes to services capabilities. The framework uses semantic effect accumulations over BPMN models to describe relationships mapping effect scenarios to service outcomes.…”

“…The framework uses semantic effect accumulations over BPMN models to describe relationships mapping effect scenarios to service outcomes. Our framework differs from the framework for alignment in [116] not only through much more detailed and extensible formal descriptions, but also in that we use the strategy modeling language as a basis for goal relations and we also consider ranked realization. The precursor to [116] is described in [115] where Koliadis and Ghose introduce the notion of relating goals (functional goals -from an and/or decomposition tree) with the accumulated effects of processes.…”

“…The problem for these activities is in defining processes that can be used in varying contexts based on customer demands and intentions [80,116,211]. Being able to dynamically construct a process that effectively works to satisfy consumer goals as well as business goals taking into consideration operational and historic context is necessary in a business setting [80,115,116].…”

“…The method of alignment discussed in this chapter will enable organisations to find if they have the right processes to fulfil their strategies; and thus, will form the basis for understanding sustainable businesses. Our framework for alignment follows from the definition of most specification validation problems [116] with the extension that we are interested in optimizing the use of processes to fit the given strategies.…”