Business Process Lines to Deal with the Variability

Business Process Lines to deal with the Variability 1 1 2 Colette Rolland Selmin Nurcan , 1 Université Paris 1Panthéon Sorbonne 2 IAE de Paris - Sorbonne Graduate Business School Centre de Recherche en Informatique 21, rue Broca 75005 Paris France 90, rue de Tolbiac 75634 Paris cedex 13 France [email protected] [email protected] Abstract goal-driven perspective as part of an holistic view of Variability proved to be a central concept in different organizational knowledge can be found in a number of domains, manufacturing, software development etc. in approaches such as EKD-CMM [3], [32] and to support order to develop solutions that can be easily adapted to business process reengineering [1], [17], [27], [45], as well different organizational settings and different sets of as in approaches to requirements engineering. The concern customers at a low price. We argue that families of is to establish a close relationship between the ‘Why’ and business process models can facilitate the installation of the ‘What’. The former captures the strategic goals of the situated models in different organizations. We propose a organization whereas the latter tells us how they are representation system called Map to capture variability achieved through tasks carried out by actors. Focusing on in process models expressed in an intentional manner the ‘Why’ is essential to avoid unnecessary details and to through business goals and strategies. The paper focus on the ‘essence’ of the business, on what needs to presents an intentional view of the business process be achieved and the strategies required to achieve it variability and illustrates it in an excerpt of a real case independently on how to organize the business in order to in the Electricity Supply Industry. The kernel of an achieve it (the ‘What’, ‘Who’, ‘When’). This relationship organizational level model is also introduced to allow is also of prime importance to handle change and propagate intentional changes onto organizational ones. the organizational implementation of each variant. 1.2. Variability in process families 1. Introduction Over the two last decades, market changes have led to a business environment that is constantly evolving. In all management challenges, one of the major Companies change to better satisfy customer requirements related to the information systems is to be requirements, improve internal processes and adapt their continuously adapted to changing business practices and products and services. The process wave initiated by needs. This can be achieved by developing process- Hammer and Champy [13] led to the creation of large centric solutions. The importance of establishing and portfolios of business process models. We continue to preserving the ‘best fit’ between organization needs (why develop business process models since they are and what) and system functionalities (how), i.e. between recognized as indispensable artifacts to drive business process models and IS specifications is commonly management and evolution. These portfolios evolve due accepted today. to internal factors leading to business process evolution and/or external factors or mergers and acquisitions 1.1. Background where different processes, perhaps having common parts, have to be integrated. Further, business process Most of the models provided in the literature [5], [10], change involves the reuse of parts of the process to be [15], [20], [36] concentrate on Who does What, When, i.e. discarded, inclusion of parts of other processes, co- on the description of the operational performance of tasks existence of different versions of the same process etc. to produce results. Despite the fact that process modeling The situation is similar to that in manufacturing and appears to be a corner stone to help managers improve product engineering where the notions of product lines operational performance, it demonstrated to be and product families have been introduced. By analogy, insufficient to help organizations in a constantly changing we recognize business process lines and families in environment. Among others, [37] argues that a more organizations of today. Design of product lines and systemic view of an organization is necessary to handle families demonstrated the need to elicit commonalities as the problem ‘in the large’ and suggests abstracting from well as variable parts in a family and stressed the the details of process models in a goal model. A similar importance of the variability concept. Variability has been 2. Business process modeling and introduced to explicitly differentiate between the common flexibility requirements and different parts in a set of similar but different product lines of a product family. Managing commonalities and Flexibility has been the focus of many researches variability leads to two major advantages: [30], [35], [38], [41] and many definitions can be found (a) reuse of common parts [26], [44] and, in literature. Processes flexibility means fast reactivity to (b) adaptation of products to different customers internal and external changes. It also reflects the easiness and various organizational settings [42] to make evolve business process models. Seeing the duality that exists between products and Literature provides various process modeling processes, we believe that business process families formalisms, which can be classified into four categories: could beneficially be handled by introducing the concept activity oriented, product oriented, decision oriented of variability. The foregoing suggests a move away from and conversation oriented models. Each category has its management of individual process to managing a set of underlying paradigm more or less appropriate for similar processes considered as a whole, a family. We flexible process modeling. We presented a propose to organize business processes as business comprehensive survey of this literature in [25]. We process families and to manage variability and consider that a given modeling approach or language commonalities within the family in order to promote can be classified in one or more among those categories. reuse and adaptability of business process models. Activity-oriented models allow us to prescribe a We understand a business process family to be a process as a set of activities and their relationships collection of processes meeting a common goal but in regarding pre-defined control and data flows [14], [20]. different ways. For example, the goal ‘admit students’ can Such a process ‘programming’ allows one to represent be achieved through a business process family comprising the well-defined parts of processes and not the creative three processes that select students on the basis of a parts [18]. Product-oriented models put forward the national entrance examination, a university test, or school result of the activities of a process. They model the performance respectively. The variability across the three evolution of the product and couple the product state to processes is obvious. However, there is a commonality the activities that generate it [14]. These models seem to between these three processes as well: all these processes be more appropriate than activity-oriented ones for have to accept fees from the admitted student. representing knowledge intensive processes. In this paper, we propose a modeling formalism The most recent type of process models [8], [11], called MAP to capture variability across business [23], [24] is based on the decision-(or intention) oriented processes of a family in an intentional manner. The map paradigm according to which the successive is a directed, labeled, non-deterministic graph with goals transformations of the product are looked upon as as nodes, and strategies to achieve goals, as edges. Its consequences of decisions. Those models are nature allows the capture of different forms of variability semantically more powerful because they explain not through multi-edges between a pair of nodes thereby only how the process proceeds but also why [21]. This enabling many different traversals of the graph from paradigm seems to be particularly appropriate for beginning to end. Besides, using the refinement representing knowledge intensive business processes or mechanism of the map, it is possible to represent any kind of processes requiring flexibility [24]. variability at different levels of detail, in a hierarchy of Conversation models are based on the speech act maps. We show that this hierarchical nature permits us theory and on the principle that each sentence expressed to represent process families as maps. We also show the by someone represents an intention, a commitment [40]. power of a map to represent variability and, as an As a matter of fact, highlighting the organizational illustration, model the variations of an electricity supply reasons, which cause the communications between process family as a hierarchy of maps. some roles, can justify changes of processes. The paper is organized in five sections. The next Since the introduction of the process centered view of section summarizes the flexibility requirements for organization management by M. Hammer and J. business process modeling. Section 3 introduces the Champy, business process modeling gained importance MAP formalism to capture variability of business in both the management community and the system processes modeled in an intentional manner. Section 4 engineering community. During the two late decades, presents an example and also considers the adaptation of

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