Keeping decisions and rationale explicit in business process analysis

Abstract

Business Process Modeling and Analysis are activities of intense decision-making. Business process decisions documentation is often considered as a tedious task, which is usually skipped or performed inadequately. As a consequence, the rationale underlying decisions become hard to recover from unstructured documents. It can easily get lost when only stored in the stakeholders' minds and implicit in models built. In order to minimize losing rationale about decisions and to optimize business process analysis, this paper proposes an approach to organize and document business process decisions and rationale. This proposal relies on design rationale and comprises a model and a process of capturing business process analysis information. It can be seen as an application of rationale management within business process management, as a way to improve reasonability and maintainability of business process models. Accordingly, the proposal allows better analysis of business process problems, assessment and validation of alternative solutions, as well as the reuse of decisions in business process analysis and modeling following sessions.