Defining process performance indicators by using templates and patterns

Abstract

Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset for the measurement of the achievement of strategic and operational goals in process-oriented organisations. Ideally, the definition of PPIs should not only be unambiguous, complete, and understandable to non-technical stakeholders, but also traceable to business processes and verifiable by means of automated analysis. In practice, PPIs are defined either informally in natural language, with its well-known problems, or at a very low level, or too formally, becoming thus hardly understandable to managers and users. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, a novel approach to improve the definition of PPIs using templates and ontology-based linguistic patterns is proposed. Its main benefits are that it is easy to learn, promotes reuse, reduces ambiguities and missing information, is understandable to all stakeholders and maintains traceability with the process model. Furthermore, since it relies on a formal ontology based on Description Logics, it is possible to perform automated analysis and infer knowledge regarding the relationships between PPI definitions and other process elements. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.