Defining process performance indicators: An ontological approach

Abstract

It is increasingly important to evaluate the performance of business processes. A key instrument to carry out this evaluation is by means of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) as suggested in many methodologies and frameworks like, for instance, COBIT, ITIL or EFQM. As a consequence, it is convenient to integrate the management of PPIs into the whole business process lifecycle from its design to its evaluation. In this paper, we focus on the definition of PPIs as a necessary step to achieve that integration. Unfortunately, current proposals are not able to specify several usual types of PPIs, specially those related to data, and are not well designed to enable the automated analysis of PPIs at design-time. In this paper, we present an ontology for the definition of process performance indicators that overcomes this issue, explicitly defines the relationships between the indicators and the elements defined in a business process modelled in BPMN, and enables the analysis of PPIs at design-time. Furthermore, this ontology has been validated by means of several real-world scenarios. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.