=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-109/paper-10
|storemode=property
|title=Material for brainstorming: Towards a common notion of goal for business process modeling
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-109/discussion.pdf
|volume=Vol-109
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/gbpm/Bider02
}}
==Material for brainstorming: Towards a common notion of goal for business process modeling==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-109/discussion.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
       Towards a common notion of goal for business
                    process modeling
                         Ilia Bider, IbisSoft, stockhol, Sweden
                                     ilia@ibissoft.se

We follow the most general definition that describes a business process as a set of
partially ordered activities aimed at reaching a well-defined goal. Some examples of
goals are as follows:

   •   Discharging a patient from the hospital in a (relatively) healthy state.
   •   Closing a sale.
   •   Making a decision on a particular matter.

When discussing business processes, it is important to differentiate the process type
from the process instance. The notion of process type is used when talking about the
process in general, like:

   •   Sales process (in general).
   •   Processing insurance claims.
   •   Decision-making.

The notion of process instance, or process occurrence, is used to pinpoint a particular
process, like:

   •   Processing a sales lead that concern a particular customer.
   •   Processing insurance claim #1345678.
   •   Passing an elderly care plan for 2002.

Two types of goals can be distinguished when discussing business processes: strategic
and operational goals. Strategic goals, like customer satisfaction, growth, profit, etc.
are associated with the process type. They explain why the process exists/should exist
in the organization, and why it should be driven in a certain way. Analysis of strategic
goals results in the rules/procedures that dictate how the instances of the given
business process should be run. All such rules for a given process type constitute a
process definition.
Operational goals concern process instances, and they show when a given process
instance can be considered as finished. Examples of operational goals that correspond
to the process types above are as follows:

   •   Understand the customer’s needs and make an offer (sales process).
   •   Insure that all basic documents that concern a particular insurance claim are
       collected and money are paid (processing insurance claims).
   •   Pass a decision on an elderly care plan based on the needs, available resources,
       and current legislation (decision-making).

It is very important to distinguish strategic goals from operational ones. It might be
quite dangerous to move such strategic goal as “customer satisfaction” from the
strategic plan directly to the operational plan. A nurse, or a doctor in the hospital


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                          Towards a common notion of goal


cannot think about customer satisfaction every minute when they do their everyday
work, they just need to follow the established policies, i.e., the rules of the business
processes in which they participate.
To reach strategic goals in practice, the latter need to be translated into operational
procedures. For example, for the sales process, “customer satisfaction” can be
achieved only if the needs of each customer are understood and the product sold to the
customer matches these needs. To ensure this “satisfaction”, one needs an operational
procedure that requires (or sometimes) forces the sales personal to mandatory perform
detailed analysis of the customer needs.
Though strategic and operational goals lie in different dimensions when they are
considered in respect to the same process type, the way of achieving them may not
differ that much. It is difficult, if ever possible, to create optimal operational
procedures and policies that ensure fulfillment of strategic goals at once. Thus, there
should exist another process aimed at stepwise creating a process definition that can
ensure fulfillment of the strategic goals of the targeted business process. This other
process is a managerial process, and it belongs to the domain of business process
management.
The managerial process can be roughly defined as a following sequence of activities:

   1. Define strategic goals for the targeted process and the way of measurement of
      their achievement. For example, for the sales process, customer satisfaction
      can be established as a percent of customers placing a new order within a year
      from the previous one.
   2. Define new operational procedures and polices.
   3. Ensure that the operational procedures are followed on practice.
   4. Run a number of process instances based on the new procedures and polices.
   5. Gather statistical information on “performance” of the new process definition
      (how well the strategic goals are satisfied). Preferably, this information should
      be gathered automatically when the process instances are running.
   6. Compare performance measurements to the goals established at step 1. Change
      operational procedures, possibly, correct goals. Go to step 4.

Thus, strategic goals of a targeted business process can be viewed as operational goals
of some managerial process. This allows us to have a common approach to process
modeling and control. We can concentrate on operational goals: how to define them
conceptually and formally, and how to measure the distance between the current state
of the process and the projected goal




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