Towards impact analysis of data in business processes

Abstract

Business processes heavily rely on data. Data is used as input for activities; it is manipulated during process execution and it serves for decisions made during the process. Thus, changes (in values or structure) of data may influence large portions of the business process. We introduce in this paper the concept of ‘data impact analysis’ which analyzes the effects of data elements on other business process elements, including activities, routing constraints, and other data elements. This type of analysis is important in scenarios such as process or database redesign and unexpected changes in data values. The paper further proposes a set of primitives depicting impacts of data within business processes, and demonstrates the use of these primitives to query the overall impact of a data element within a business process.