Bus Inf Syst Eng 58(1):1–6 (2016)

DOI 10.1007/s12599-015-0409-x

EDITORIAL

Business Process Management

Don’t Forget to Improve the Process!

Wil M. P. van der Aalst • Marcello La Rosa •

Flávia Maria Santoro

Published online: 4 January 2016

 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2015

1 Introduction • The systematic identification of typical process behav-

iors based on scientific insights provided by the
Over the last decade business process management (BPM) Workflow Patterns initiative.1
has become a mature discipline, with a well-established set • The automatic creation of configurable process models
of principles, methods and tools that combine knowledge from a collection of process model variants, used to
from information technology, management sciences and guiding analysts when selecting the right configuration.
industrial engineering with the purpose of improving • The automatic execution of business process models
business processes (van der Aalst 2004, 2013; Weske 2007; based on rigorously defined semantics, and through a
Dumas et al. 2013). The successful international BPM variety of BPM systems.
conference series (http://bpm-conference.org) shows that • The adaptation of processes on-the-fly and the evalu-
there is a stable scientific core and substantial progress in ation of the impact of their changes, in order to react to
specific BPM areas. Examples of BPM areas where (unexpected) exceptions.
remarkable progress has been made include: • The automatic discovery of process models from raw
event data produced by common information systems
• The syntactic verification of complex business process
found in organizations.
models before implementing them via IT, to avoid
potentially costly mistakes at run time. Looking at the evolution of the BPM conference series
one can conclude that some of the scientific problems have
been successfully solved and these results (partly) adopted
Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. W. M. P. van der Aalst in practice.
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (MF 7.103), BPM is a broad discipline. Hence, numerous BPM
Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, papers can be found in broader conferences such as the
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS),
e-mail: [email protected]
the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS),
Prof. Dr. M. La Rosa (&) the International Conference on Advanced Information
BPM Discipline, IS School, Queensland University of Systems Engineering (CAiSE), the International Confer-
Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, QLD 4001, Australia ence on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), the
e-mail: [email protected]
International Conference on Business Information Systems
Prof. Dr. M. La Rosa (BIS) and Business Process Modeling, Development, and
NICTA Queensland Research Lab, 70-72 Bowen St, Spring Hill, Support (BPMDS), as well as a number of scientific jour-
Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia nals. There is also significant interest from practitioners.
Prof. Dr. F. M. Santoro Large organizations model their processes in languages
Departamento de Informática Aplicada, Universidade Federal do such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) and
Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Avenida Pasteur, 458, Urca,
Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22245-040, Brazil
1
e-mail: [email protected] http://workflowpatterns.com.

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have programs related to process improvement. Nowadays, power) entered the workplace. The second industrial rev-
one could argue that the ‘‘process thinking’’ mindset is olution (1870–1969) was based on mass production, the
common in most organizations. division of labor, and the use of electrical energy. The third
Despite the attention for BPM in academia and industry, industrial revolution (1969–2015) was driven by the
there is a considerable gap between (1) the state-of-the-art availability of computers, networks, and other IT systems.
BPM technologies and approaches and (2) the actual usage Today, people talk about ‘‘Industry 4.0’’ (Hermann et al.
by BPM practitioners and their needs. For example, only 2015) as the fourth industrial revolution. The goal is to
few organizations use BPM systems to automatically exe- create ‘‘smart’’ manufacturing systems using a combination
cute their operational processes. In many cases, processes of embedded systems, sensors, networks, service orienta-
are hard-coded in applications (e.g., ERP systems like SAP tion, big data, and analytics.
or home-grown systems). Of course, BPM does not imply Although the above four industrial revolutions are often
the use of BPM systems. Business processes need to be associated with factories and physical production systems,
managed in environments where processes are only partly they also apply to administrative processes and services.
documented and a range of information systems is used. Governmental agencies, banks, insurance companies etc.
These systems are often ‘‘unaware’’ of the processes in can be seen as ‘‘administrative factories’’. The division of
which they are used. labor (i.e., specialization), the economies of scale and
In this paper, we reflect on the current state of BPM and experience curve effects, and computerization radically
what could be done to bridge the gap between BPM changed these administrative processes. In such modern
research and practical use of BPM technologies. We argue ‘‘production processes’’, the product is often information
that in BPM research there has frequently been an exces- provisioned through a service, rather than a physical entity.
sive focus on specific artifacts (such as process models). BPM should be viewed in this context. The early Workflow
However, better models do not automatically yield better Management (WFM) systems were clearly inspired by
processes. Hence, research should be better aligned to the production processes in the manufacturing industry. The
original goal of BPM of improving business processes, term ‘‘Straight-Through Processing’’ (STP) refers to the
rather than improving process models – an observation also desire for fully automating processes without any human
made by Marlon Dumas in his recent keynote speech at involvement, like a fully-automated assembly line to pro-
BPM’15 (Dumas 2015). duce cars.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to common Through WFM systems, business process automation
process performance dimensions such as time, quality, resonated well in organizations heavily investing in Busi-
costs and compliance are often mentioned in research on ness Process Reengineering (BPR) in the 1990s (Hammer
process improvement, but it is often unclear how research and Champy 1993). As a result, an explosion of commer-
results and related BPM technology concretely contribute cial WFM systems started around 1995 (cf. systems such as
to better KPIs. At the same time, many good ideas are not Staffware, COSA and IBM MQ Series Workflow). How-
adopted: they are not implemented in the information ever, the roots of such systems can already be found in the
systems people actually use. Moreover, organizational late seventies. At that time people like Skip Ellis, Anatol
resistance may provide major roadblocks to the successful Holt and Michael Zisman worked on Office Information
execution of BPM initiatives. (OI) systems driven by explicit process models (van der
Accordingly, the remainder of the paper is organized as Aalst 2013). OI systems like Officetalk and SCOOP used
follows. Section 2 provides a very brief history of BPM to Petri nets to model and enact operational processes. These
put things in context. In Sect. 3, we identify the goal of systems and also the later WFM systems did not pay much
BPM (better processes rather than better models). Section 4 attention to management aspects. Moreover, they were
highlights directions that may help to bridge the gap typically very restrictive, straight-jacketing processes into
identified. Section 5 overviews the papers contained in this some structured and ‘‘idealized’’ process.
special issue and Sect. 6 concludes this paper. BPM can be seen as an evolution of the concept of
WFM (van der Aalst 2013). WFM primarily focuses on the
automation of business processes, whereas BPM has a
2 A Brief History of BPM broader scope: from process automation and process
analysis to operations management and the organization of
Since the first industrial revolution, productivity has been work. On the one hand, BPM aims to improve business
increasing due to technical innovations, improvements in processes, possibly without the use of new technologies.
the organization of work, and the use of information For example, by modeling a business process and analyz-
technology. During the first industrial revolution ing it using simulation, management may hit on ideas on
(1784–1870) machines (e.g., driven by water and steam how to reduce costs while improving service levels. On the

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other hand, BPM is often associated with software to prerequisite for process automation. However, models that
manage, control and support operational processes. This are sound but at the same time not used to configure a BPM
gave rise to a new type of technology, called BPM systems, system do not improve performance. Even if they were
which can connect with a variety of (legacy) systems as used for process automation, they would not necessarily
well as emerging technology (e.g., cloud networks, mobile lead to better processes just because they are deadlock-free.
devices), and have effectively replaced their predecessors, A sound process model may still cause unnecessary bot-
the WFM systems. tlenecks and rework.
This short discussion of the history of BPM shows that Therefore, we advocate a focus on the process rather
there is a trend from automating processes (OI and WFM than on its model. This does not mean that process models
systems) to managing processes (BPM). However, the should be abandoned, but rather that they should be created
majority of existing BPM research approaches still seems with a clear purpose in mind. For example, while it makes
to be based on the assumptions used by WFM and the early sense to employ a very detailed process model if the pur-
OI systems. Process management has turned out to be pose is automation, this level of sophistication, which
much more ‘‘thorny’’ than envisioned by the pioneers in the clearly comes at a cost, is not justified if the purpose of the
field. model is to identify redesign opportunities aimed at
reducing waste. For this, a high-level process model would
be sufficient, so long as it is possible to distinguish value-
3 What Defines a Better Process? adding from non-value-adding or redundant activities. In
fact, the perspectives of a process model one should focus
The lion’s share of BPM and WFM literature seems to on, and their level of detail, should be determined by the
focus on process models. The control-flow perspective strategic objective of the BPM project at hand (e.g.,
(modeling the ordering of activities) is often the backbone increasing operational efficiency rather than outsmarting
of such models. Other perspectives such as the resource competitors).
perspective (modeling organizational units, roles, autho- A better process is thus one that better contributes to
rizations, IT systems, equipment etc.), the data or artifact meeting the strategic objectives of an organization. When
perspective (modeling decisions, data creation, forms, etc.), the level of contribution is not as expected, BPM projects
the time perspective (modeling durations, deadlines, etc.), are set up to improve business process performance. To
and the function perspective (describing activities and measure process improvements we can use various Key
related applications) are often mentioned, but receive less Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs, also known
attention. There is the belief that better (control-flow) as process performance measures, are quantities that can
models will lead to better processes. We dare to question be unambiguously determined for a given business pro-
this belief for several reasons. First of all, the process cess, assuming that the data to calculate these perfor-
models used for performance analysis may not resemble mance measures is available (Dumas et al. 2013). They
reality. They are mainly rely on information from those are defined over performance dimensions such as time,
who participate in the process (the process participants), quality, cost, flexibility, etc. For example, we can measure
through workshops or interviews, and as such may be time using cycle time, waiting time, or non-value adding
subject to their knowledge bias and influenced by norms time; cost using cost per execution, resource utilization,
and expectations of the organization. They may describe an and waste; and quality using customer satisfaction, errors
idealized or particular situation and thus are often not rate, and SLA violations. Some KPIs can be measured
useful to provide the insights needed (van der Aalst 2011). quite easily, such as cycle time. Others may be more
Second, these conceptual models are rarely used to guide difficult and time-consuming to quantify, e.g., customer
the implementation of a process automation solution. satisfaction may require aggregating data from customer
Indeed, few organizations actually use BPM technology to experience surveys, product evaluations, loyalty analyses,
run their processes. Most resort to custom-made or stan- etc.
dard software where processes are hard-coded or not sup- The choice of which KPIs to measure should reflect the
ported at all. There is no indication that this will change strategic objectives of the organization. For example, time-
dramatically in the near future. Despite all work on flexi- and cost-related KPIs are typically measured when the
bility (Reichert and Weber 2012), BPM systems are still objective is to increase operational efficiency, while quality
perceived as being too restrictive, yet very costly. There- may be used when the objective is to increase market
fore, we argue that a focus on automation will not help to penetration. KPIs must be associated with target values,
bridge the gap mentioned earlier. Process models are only e.g., the cycle time of a claim handling process must not
useful if they actually help to improve processes. For exceed 5 working days from the time the claim is lodged to
example, verifying the absence of deadlocks in models is a the time it is approved or rejected. These targets should be

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determined in line with the strategic plan of an community has mostly devoted its attention to the quality
organization. of the artifacts produced (e.g., the accuracy of the process
After identifying the KPIs, the question ‘‘how to models extracted from the logs), rather than to improving
improve the process in terms of its KPIs?’’ still needs to be the actual processes for which such logs are available.
answered, i.e., how to improve the process KPIs in order Therefore, a possible research direction is to bridge the
for these to meet the envisaged targets. Two possible current gap between process mining and Six Sigma. For
research directions are discussed next. instance, process mining techniques could be used to
extract detailed and accurate process performance mea-
surements (e.g., in the form of process models enhanced
4 How Can BPM Contribute to Better Processes? with performance statistics) on top of which Six Sigma
techniques could be applied to pinpoint causes for vari-
One promising direction to better link BPM to the concrete ability, and to identify and evaluate the impact of different
improvement of process KPIs is to exploit event data process changes on the process KPIs.
present in the organization. For example, Six Sigma Another avenue to obtain better processes consists in
(Pyzdek 2003) has applied statistical analysis tools to applying techniques from Operations Research to the
organizational data for a long time, in order to measure and realm of business processes. Operations Research (OR) is
reduce the degree of business process variability. The idea a well-established research area that aims to solve com-
is to identify and remove the causes for such variability, plex decision-making problems by employing a variety of
e.g., in terms of errors, defects or SLA violations in the mathematical techniques, such as simulation, queuing
output of business processes, and to control that such theory, optimization, and statistics (Moder and Elmagh-
processes effectively perform within the desired perfor- raby 1978). Many process improvement problems can in
mance targets (e.g., ensuring that there are no more than 10 fact be traced back to typical problems investigated by
SLAs per month). However, while Six Sigma is focused on OR, since there are typically a number of constraints and
improving business processes by statistically quantifying options making it hard to find optimal solutions. In a way,
process performance changes, the data used for such the goal is to optimize a process according to given KPIs
analyses is typically collected manually, e.g., through (typically time and resources usage). For example, OR
surveys or observation. This makes the employment of techniques can be used to minimize cycle time by
such techniques, when carried out properly, very costly and determining the optimal execution order of process
time consuming. Moreover, Six Sigma rarely looks inside activities, or to minimize process costs by determining the
end-to-end processes. The focus is on a specific step in the optimal assignment of process activities to participants.
process or on aggregate measures. The value of linking Operations Research and BPM was
This problem can be obviated through the use of tech- first realized by John Buzacott, who advocated the use of
niques that automatically extract process knowledge from queuing theory to evaluate the conditions under which
event data logged by common information systems, e.g., radical process changes in the context of BPR initiatives
ERP or ticketing systems. In this context, the process are likely to be appropriate (Buzacott 1996). More
mining research area (van der Aalst 2011) has emerged, recently, OR techniques have been applied to resolve
proposing a range of methods and tools for exploiting such resource contention issues in business processes (Man-
data to automatically discover a process model, or check its delbaum and Zeltyn 2013; Senderovich et al. 2014) or to
compliance with existing reference models or norms, or to identify an optimal allocation of human resources to
determine the causes for process deviations or variants. The process activities in order to minimize risk (Conforti et al.
advantage of relying on logged data as opposed to data that 2015). However, barring these few exceptions, OR tech-
has been collected manually is that any insight extracted niques have not been systematically applied to solve
from this data is based on evidence, rather than on human process improvement problems yet.
confidence, and thus is a more accurate representation of
reality. Moreover, the artifacts extracted through process
mining, e.g., process models, can be enhanced with (live) 5 In This Special Issue
process performance information such as statistics on
activity duration and resource utilization. This allows The twenty BPM Use Cases described in (van der Aalst
organizations to look inside end-to-end processes. For 2013) were an initial attempt to structure the BPM disci-
these reasons, process mining methods are now being used pline by identifying ‘‘how, where and when’’ BPM tech-
across all phases of the BPM lifecycle, from discovery niques can be used. These use cases were also used to
through to monitoring. However, while a wide range of categorize all papers published in the BPM conference
techniques have been developed in this field, the research series.

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Following on from the work in (van der Aalst 2013), this used to increase the reliability of various aspects of a
special issue aims to further structure the BPM discipline business process simulation model, through informa-
and show some recent developments. Specifically, the tion extracted from event data. This study distils a
BPM Use Cases served as a starting point for the call-for- number of research challenges still to be addressed in
papers, which attracted papers covering the whole BPM order to bridge the gap between these two areas of
lifecycle. After a careful reviewing process, six papers BPM.
were selected, which are briefly described below. • The paper ‘‘A Critical Evaluation and Framework of
Business Process Improvement Methods’’, by Rob
• The paper ‘‘The State of the Art of Business Process
Vanwersch, Khurram Shahzad, Irene Vanderfeesten,
Management Research as Published in the BPM
Kris Vanhaecht, Paul Grefen, Liliane Pintelon, Jan
conference: Recommendations for Progressing the
Mendling, Frits van Merode and Hajo Reijers, provides
Field’’, by Jan Recker and Jan Mendling, offers a
a systematic review of approaches for business process
detailed analysis of the contributions of the BPM
improvement. This review leads to a classification
conference series, focusing on the research methods
framework aiming to support analysts in determining
adopted, the type of contribution, and the impact
which approach is most suited for their specific
generated. From this, the authors distill some research
improvement needs.
directions to consolidate and further develop the BPM
discipline. The special issue concludes with an interview of
• Fredrik Milani, Marlon Dumas, Raimundas Matulevi- Michael Rosemann, conducted by Marcello La Rosa, on
cius, Naved Ahmed and Silva Kasela, in their paper the role of BPM in modern organizations.
‘‘Criteria and Heuristics for Business Process Model
Decomposition: Review and Comparative Evaluation’’,
empirically evaluate different types of heuristics for 6 Conclusion
decomposing process models, in view of increasing
model understandability and maintainability. Here, the In this paper we stressed the importance of BPM research
perspective taken is not that of proposing yet another to focus on improving business processes rather than
technique for process model decomposition, but rather improving the artifacts produced by BPM techniques and
that of assessing the relative strengths of existing tools, such as process models. We did so by reflecting on
techniques. the contributions of the BPM research community, fol-
• The paper ‘‘Mixed-Paradigm Process Modeling with lowed by a short history of the BPM discipline, to high-
Intertwined State Spaces’’ by Johannes De Smedt, light, among others, its roots in Office Information and
Jochen De Weerdt, Jan Vanthienen and Geert Poels, Workflow Management systems. Next, we defined what it
contributes a stepwise approach to blend, for the first means to build better processes in terms of process per-
time, the procedural and declarative paradigms for formance, as captured by KPIs and their target values.
business process modeling. In doing so, the paper Finally, we sketched two possible research directions for
attempts to find a trade off between the strengths and bringing BPM research closer to the original BPM goal of
disadvantages of both paradigms, by performing an in- process improvement, and concluded with an overview of
depth study of the scenarios where such a mixed the papers presented in this special issue.
paradigm is useful.
• Martin Berner, Jino Augustine and Alexander Maed-
che, in ‘‘The Impact of Process Visibility on Process
Performance: A Multiple Case Study of Operations
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