Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD)

Abstract

Modeling is an important and time consuming part of the Business Process Management life-cycle. An analyst reviews existing documentation and queries relevant domain experts to construct both mental and concrete models of the domain. To aid this exercise, we propose the Rapid Business Process Discovery (R-BPD) framework and prototype tool that can query heterogeneous information resources (e.g. corporate documentation, web-content, code e.t.c.) and rapidly construct proto-models to be incrementally adjusted to correctness by an analyst. This constitutes a departure from building and constructing models toward just editing them. We believe this rapid mixed-initiative modeling will increase analyst productivity by significant orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. Furthermore, the possibility of using the approach in distributed and real-time settings seems appealing and may help in significantly improving the quality of the models being developed w.r.t. being consistent, complete, and concise. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.