Coordinated development of business processes and their support systems

Abstract

Traditional RE for business applications mainly concerns creating requirements for a software system based on business needs. For the past ten years, requirements on functionality of business applications have been slowly changing. The shift consists of moving from the command-based applications to the applications of workflow and groupware type. The difference between the traditional applications and the new generation is that while the former supports the execution of certain activities, e.g., to write a letter, to print an invoice, to complete a transaction, the latter supports the whole business process (BP). A business process support (BPS) system provides the possibility to run a business in a new, process-oriented way, a way which is more effective and efficient but which is not possible to introduce without a BPS system. This, in turn, demands to consider not only the requirements the business imposes on the system, but also the requirements the system imposes on the business. In the broader context, the focus of the development project should be shifted from the software development to coordinated development of business processes and BPS systems. The goal of a co-development project can be formulated as creating and maintaining the fit between business processes and support systems. This implies a parallel evolution of the business and its BPS system as a reaction to changes in the business environment as well as to ‘‘revolutions’’ in the information technology. While the need for alignment of business processes and their support systems has been emphasized and discussed, there is a great need for systematic approaches and tools for achieving it. The aim of this special issue is to fill the gap between the practical needs of co-development and the state of the theory and methodology of systems development, in general, and requirements engineering, in particular. This issue is a follow-up of the discussions at the Fifth International Workshop on Business Process Modeling Development and Support (BPMDS’04, Riga, Latvia), co-organized by the guest editors of this special issue; see http://www.ibissoft.se/events/bpmds04/bpmds04.htm for details. The five papers presented in this special issue were carefully selected from 13 papers initially submitted to it. The selected papers went through a number of revisions based on the reviews and guest editors’ comments. We hope that the resulting set represents a step forward in the direction of filling the above-mentioned gap. Below, we shortly overview the papers presented in the special issue. In order to properly discuss relationships between business processes and BPS systems we need to understand more clearly what a BPS system is, how it could be differentiated from, and how it is connected to all the other systems in the jungle of software that exists or might exist in an organization. The proper way of getting such understanding is by matching an organization as a whole (in all its richness) to a set of supporting tools and systems. This is what Jan L.G. Dietz and Antonia Albani describe in their paper. The analysis is done based on the W -theory that differentiates three interrelated levels within organizations. These organizational levels require different kinds of computer support that should be integrated. Based on the suggested theory, the paper gives some recommendations for an overall strategy of support systems’ design. Maintaining the fit between business processes and support systems presumes that we can measure the level of fit (or misfit) between the two. Otherwise, how would we know when it is time to begin a redesign iteration to adjust the system to the processes or the processes to the system? Is it possible to measure the fit in a quantitative way, or can it be expressed in a qualitative way only? A significant portion of the submissions to this special issue addresses the topic of evaluating and assessing the fit G. Regev (&) Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), School of Computer and Communication Sciences, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland E-mail: gil.regev@epfl.ch