Comparative process architectures in two higher education institutions

Abstract

Enterprises are increasingly organising their activities and IT support around key business processes. These processes and their interrelationships may be identified in a process architecture. Ould (2005) claims that the Riva method identifies the process architecture that an organisation should have, and asserts that organisations in the same business have the same process architecture. This assertion is not self-evidently true, and it has not been corroborated by the literature. But it is an important claim: if true, then process architectures could be reused either for new process development, or for appraising an organisation's existing architecture. We assessed the assertion by comparing the process architectures produced by applying Riva to two higher education institutions. The results partially support the view that an essential process architecture underpins higher education institutions, and also that for regulated business domains the optimal process architecture may be one based upon designed as well as essential business entities. The conclusion is that process architecture reuse, with its attendant potential savings of time and money, is worth investigating further, even though the extent to which the invariant assertion is testable may not be clear yet. Biographical notes: Ian Beeson, after an early career (1969-1982) which included working as a Programmer and Systems Analyst for the national postal/telecommunication organisation and for a local authority, then lectured in information systems for close to 30 years, first at Manchester Polytechnic and then at the University of the West of England, until his retirement in 2011. 36 I. Beeson et al. His qualifications are in social anthropology and computer science and his central research interests are focused in the philosophy of information technology, social informatics, and the scope and limits of systems modelling. Richard Kamm is the Head of Learning and Teaching Quality and a member of the Information Systems teaching staff at the School of Management, University of Bath. He has published on business process modelling and on the wider context of information systems in organisations. He has also worked for the Quality Assurance Agency, the body for higher education standards in the UK, on the national code of practice for universities.