Multi-process reporting and analysis for change management and performance reviews

Abstract

Business process design and governance are two important phases of Business Process Management (BPM). They are however usually performed using tools that tend to be too generic and technical for most business analysts. For instance, they promote Business Intelligence (BI) mechanisms to extract reports for the analysis of the executed processes, but they typically focus on one process definition at a time. This approach has shortcomings in organisations where there are large collections of processes that need to be managed consistently. In previous work, we proposed the generation of domain-specific studios, in order to enable analysts to design their processes in a much more intuitive way than with generic languages. This work is a logical continuation through the addition of domain-specific multi-process reporting and analysis. By defining analytics metrics in a domain-specific space, analysts are able to make business performance reviews and manage change in ways that apply directly and quickly to entire collections of process. The appropriateness and the feasibility of the approach are shown through a detailed use-case and a complete prototype implementation.