Business Process Management Methodology

Abstract

The methodologies chapter completes this book. It starts by looking into the dependencies between business processes, based on their supplier/consumer relationships, formalized as process landscapes. These dependencies are instrumental not only for business processes of several partners that interact with each other, but also for business processes that are performed within a given organization. The methodology introduced can be used to better understand these dependencies and thereby improving the business processes.

Bibliographical Notes

Workflow application development processes have been discussed in Weske et al. (2001). The material presented in Chapter 8 extends the work presented therein and combines it with a methodology focusing on supplier-customer relationships of processes, developed in Füermann and Dammasch (2008). Pulier and Taylor (2006) investigate development methodologies for enterprise application integration scenarios in service-oriented architectures from a practical point of view, using a fictious enterprise. Complex correspondencies between business processes on different levels of abstraction are investigated with respect to their behaviour in Weidlich (2011). Critical success factors of process oriented information systems are investigated in Mutschler et al. (2008). Process improvement has been addressed in Mansar and Reijers (2005) and Reijers (2005), where best practices of process improvement based on heuristic rules were identified.

In the context of the Integrated Definition Methods (IDEF) approach, an IDEF3 process description capture method is proposed in Meyer et al. (1995). This method comes with dedicated organizational regulations, forms to describe processes and activities, and a process description language.