Business Process Performance Knowledge Base

The paper presents a grid of business process performances that crosses performance metrics and stakeholders’ perspectives. The reason why to address performances comes from the growing attention to the timeliness, precision and overall quality of the services that organizations deliver to their customers, from the proliferation of Service Level Agreements between Businesses and Customer’s Bill of Rights fro consumers. This reflects the rising impact of services on the economy, that accounts over 80% of the GNP in developed countries. A first part of the paper positions the grid in the continuing discussions on process performances. Michael Hammer (2007) proposes a toolkit to assess the maturity of business processes. According to Hammer, a process is mature if it is capable of delivering higher performance over time. However, the framework is qualitative. In our view, process performance measurement should be quantitative. Qualitative measures give room to arbitrary interpretations. BSC proposes a quantitative framework. However it considers only the management perspective. In our view, this perspective is too narrow. Our assumption is that a viable and performing process should assure returns to a whole range of stakeholders, that includes not only managers but also customers and operators. Hence, process performances should satisfy expectations that are diverse and sometimes conflicting. Furthermore, it cannot include only costs butalso time (service) and quality measures. The stakeholder balance distinguishes our design approach from BPR and BPM management theories (and from connected consulting approaches). Actually BPR founds process innovation on paradigmatic models and disregards a preliminary and organic assessment of performances, that include the perspective not only of management but also of workers and customers. BPM, that can be considered as a revised version of BPR, is very much oriented to support a process oriented behaviour by management, but it does not define a reference design meta-model. A second novelty of the approach is the relation between he design of the process architecture and target performances, that gives rise to a specific methodology. A third key point is an open knowledge base, that is discussed in a separate paper.