A prototype for continuous improvement of processes and their results in the field of higher education

Abstract

PurposeThe concept of business process (BP) management plays a major role in information systems with several applications. Modeling languages and tools can be used by domain experts to help in the business process model (BPM) design. The purpose of this paper is to focus on quality improvement for BPMs through the proposition of a novel prototype and apply it on real case for BPMs in the field of higher education.Design/methodology/approachThe authors developed a prototype named Business Process Model Quality Assess (BPMoQualAssess) that works in two steps. In the first step, it allows designing and verifying the quality of BPMs in the field of higher education. Second, it focuses on evaluating process results through a set of criteria and specific measures for each process. Both steps are based on three main key concepts: measures, threshold values and guidelines in order to guide the modeler in assessing his/her model and also to get good results from the latter.FindingsThe authors implemented the BPMoQualAssess prototype to evaluate the quality of BPMs as well as its results. Furthermore, the authors have conducted a case study with a process in the field of higher education. Indeed, first, the authors obtained an improved BPM with a high-quality level. Second, the authors then evaluated the results by focusing on measures, threshold values and appropriate quality guidelines in order to obtain better results.Originality/valueIn the context of this study, the authors aim to make a significant contribution to the knowledge on the subject of the quality for higher education sector processes, on one hand on the models and on the other hand the results of processes. All these concepts are fully nested within a new quality prototype for process model evaluation and validated on real BPMs in the field of higher education. There are many publications focusing on BP quality in the literature, but only a few approaches combine the main keys thresholds, measures and guidelines. In fact, the principal contribution of this research consists in linking measures and threshold values to the resulting guidelines as they have been presented separately in the literature. Furthermore, the authors elaborate for each measure its own recommendation to guide the modeler in redesigning his/her model. Also, the authors define threshold values of process results in higher education and also took into account the opinion of domain experts. To sum up, the originality of this work appears in the application of BPM in the field of higher education given the lack of work in the literature for this direction, and it will pave a way for research in BP innovation areas.