BUSINESS PROCESS ENGINEERING

IT Requirements of Business Process Management in Practice An Empirical Study

Susanne Patig, Vanessa Casanova-Brito, and Barbara Vgeli

Sumit kainth
5/13/2011

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INTRODUCTION
Large organizations that have so much of competition and very challenging aggressive marketing often have the same opinion regarding the processes of their companies, they want their organizations to be agile to any changes in the market. For this to be effective companies have to Understand their processes and also to develop them such that they can be changed as desired when necessary. Business Process Management helps these companies to quickly understand the processes and also to adapt to the marketing conditions. In this paper we will review the article from the 8th international conference of BPE i.e IT requirements Business Process Management in Practice. The paper will discuss about the maturity levels and how can different companies can be classified into different levels of maturity After discussing the maturity levels, the BPM tools used by the company will be discussed .As the article being reviewed discusses an empirical study related to different prospects of business process ,its results will also be discussed in detail and how the study was carried out will be elaborated.

BPM and MATURITY LEVELS

According to (

) Business process management deals with all the activities related to

design , activities ,analysis ,monitoring and continuous improvement of business process. For

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realizing of business goals and objectives there are sets of linked activities and tasks which are known as Business Processes. In this study we find that most of the companies are having low BPM maturity .BPM levels indicate the level of BPM capabilities in the companies. Typical maturity levels according to ( , , ) are : Level 1:- No processes are defined and the organization is functional. Level 2:- Processes which are usually used are defined, and the top management from different areas meet regularly to interact with each other properly. Level 3:-All processes are defined and different strategies are used for BPM implementation and a process oriented organization exists to gather process date and optimize processes. Level 4:- The coordination within the company and with its external entities is process oriented performance measures and BPM softwares are extensively used.

MATURITY MODELS

Different maturity models have been introduced for Business Process Management over the years. Rohloff introduced the Process Management Maturity Assessment (PMMA) which was developed for measuring and improving the Business Process Management in the company ,other models such as Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM), the process audit of Hammer, and maturity model of Rosemann are few models which not only applied for measuring BPM maturity but also focus on measure for improvement of management(Rohloff). Analyzing the maturity level in Business Process Management is important in BPM implementation process. According to Rohloff the PMMA is generally focused on assessing the activities related to the implementation of Business Process Management. PMMA provides set of methods for structured analysis and assessment of the status implementation achieved of process

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management that is the process management maturity (Rohloff). Major objective of PMMA is the improvement of the process management and also the requirement identification. With the PMMA approach some of the following objective are pursued according to Rohloff are: Assess the maturity level of BPM and the processes. To invoke the awareness for process management among all the actors involved in the process. To reveal the potential of best initiated process. To monitor the working of process and derive future process actions.

So models are derived to measure the maturity levels and to help the companies to actually access their processes and the maturity level they are at present. By using models, process improvement can be analyzed and reviewed for companies to move to another BPM maturity level .

EMPIRICAL STUDY

BPM tools denotes the software which can be used to administer and regulate certain Business Processes. According to ( , , ) BPM tools should be able to provide description of

processes . The main focus of the study is based upon BPM tools and the object of research is the Business processes ,process models etc ( , , ).Many number of studies have been carried

out and some key points in business maturity were process documentation which denotes the maturity level 2, Process management and process language are necessary for Level 3 and maturity level 4 the support by BPM tools and process oriented jobs are needed.

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RESEARCH METHOD Participants:- The study includes the companies which have listed in the Forbes Global
2000. As the focus of this study is on IT support for BPM e-readiness is taken into consideration . According to ( , , ) E-readiness is the skills and capacity of a country and its

business to take advantage of information and communication technology for improvement of their companies. In this study e-readiness is taken into consideration from 2008 and about 70 countries are assessed with average score of 6.4. The total number of companies which responded to the investigation were N=130 out of 1680 companies, so the response rate was just of 11%. These companies were from Europe(58%), North America (20%), Asia(18%) and Oceania (5%). The questionnaire of the study was mostly answered by representatives of the IT department (53%), BPM (22.9%), or from the company organization (13.3%), functional areas (9.6%) and product division (1.2%).

Materials:- The questionnaire of the study consisted of the 42 questions that were grouped in
the areas dealing with BPM (current status, tools), processes (characteristics , change, statistics ), Process modeling (procedure ,language used) and socio-demographics information. All 42 questions provided a list with alternatives and an alternative other to enter free text for unanticipated answers. The answers from the questionnaire were collected on a nominal scale that is participants can select all the options if applicable or ordinal scale in which participants has to answer according to ranking. For this study by ( , , ) companies were contacted

through mails which included the letter and the link to the questionnaire. In letter sent, the companies were briefed about the goal and the purpose of the investigation. The letters were written in different languages according to the location of the companies and to extent the understanding of the research.

Procedure:- For the study the questionnaire which was previously prepared was revised by the
10 BPM experts to check the understandability and clarity of the questions. These revised questions were send to the respective companies CEOs and CIOs and asked them to forward to the person responsible for the BPM. After sending the questions continuous reminders were given to the companies about the questionnaire through the mails and phones . The duration of

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the surveys was from January to December 2009. Companies were offered the result of the investigation free of cost in place of the result of the questionnaire.

RESULTS
As most of the questions involved in the questionnaire were on the nominal scale so the sum of the responses usually exceeds the number N of the company responses. The percentage column in the tables always relates to the count ci alternative to the sum ci of counts of all alternatives and percentages of response is percentage of the responses relates the count ci of alternatives to number of responses N (N130). Processes :-The following table shows the result related to the managed processes that is Question 1 to 5. The Q5 is related to the scope of processes in which most processes are related to the companys products (78/60.9%) followed by the administration (71/55.5%), contact (67/52.3%), integration (66/51.6%), development (65/50.8%), emergency procedures (33/25.8%) and other things(12/9.4%). Statistics for an average process (Question) Please estimate the
(Q1) Number of involved persons from the same department (Q2) Number of involved departments (Q3) Number of other companies Involved (Q4) Number of applications involved (Q5) Number of tasks

Minimum
1

Maximum Mean 55 18 8 24 120 7.31 3.7 1.6 4.27 19.9

Standard Deviation 11.59 2.56 1.39 4.22 20.82

N/na 70/60 73/57 58/72 69/61 60/70

1 0 1 3

The questions 7 to question 9 are answered in the ordinal scale and are related to the organization distribution , run time and execution frequency respectively.

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Question
Most Distribution of processes (Q7) 1 Company & >1 Department (83) In days (54) Several times a day (59)

Rating
Some 1 Department & >1 Person (51); >1 Company (55) In weeks (49) A few 1 Department & 1 Person (60) In month (34); in years (30)

N/na

130/0

Measure of average process run time (Q8) Execution frequencies of processes (Q9)

87/43

Several times a Several week times a (58) / a month year (50) (56)

102/28

Question 7 results shows that most of the processes stays within the company and goes through different departments. The average run time i.e question 8 of most processes are measured in days, some have in weeks and few have in years. The majority of processes are executed (Q9) several times a day, some per week or per month and few are executed in years. According to the results of the study the frequency of process changes is low (N=111,na=19). There isnt much changes in the processes except those of involving internal business (115/88.5%) i.e the trigger of process change (Q11, N=130, na=0) followed by reasons relating to the environment (92/70.8%), planned values (52/40%) and internal description (28/21.5%). Process Description :- Process documentation is the key turning point to reach the maturity levels 2 and 3 ( , , ).Study shows that the company document their processes (Q12) by text

and using any modeling language (55.9%), some use tables (31.5%). BPMN is the most used modeling language followed by the UML(Unified Modeling Language) and EPCs.

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