=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1295/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=KPIshare: A Collaborative Space for BPM Practitioners for Full Definitions and Discussions on Process KPIs
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1295/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-1295
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bpm/ResinasdCBTC14
}}
==KPIshare: A Collaborative Space for BPM Practitioners for Full Definitions and Discussions on Process KPIs==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1295/paper9.pdf
KPIshare: A Collaborative Space
for BPM Practitioners for Full Definitions
and Discussions on Process KPIs?
Manuel Resinas1 , Adela del-Rı́o-Ortega1 , Antonio Ruiz-Cortés1 ,
Dominik Blattner2 , Kristina Tasheva2 , and Bozhan Chipev2
1
Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
2
Cupenya, B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands
{resinas,adeladelrio,aruiz}@us.es
{dominik.blattner,kristina.tasheva,bozhan.chipev}@cupenya.com
http://kpishare.co
Abstract. The definition of process-related key performance indica-
tors (KPIs) is a key part of performance measurement and one of the
most challenging because of the lack of one best way to define business-
applicable KPIs that are both aligned with the strategic goals that the
organisation wants to achieve and, at the same time, measurable and
as objective as possible. In this demo, we present KPIshare, which is a
web platform whose main goal is to provide the BPM community with a
knowledge base of well-defined, mature KPIs and a place where they can
discuss, collaborate and create process-related KPIs that are applicable
in real business situations. To this end, KPIshare introduces a detailed
structure for KPI definition and the concept of operational KPI challenge
as a mechanism to foster the collaboration in the platform.
1 Introduction
One of the major challenges when implementing a performance measurement
system for continuous improvement of business processes is related to the lack of
one best way to define business-applicable process-related KPIs that are aligned
with the strategic goals that the organisation wants to achieve while, at the
same time, are measurable and as objective as possible [3, 4]. Because of this
reason, most process best practice or reference frameworks such as ITIL, SCOR
or CMMi encourage and even provide KPIs for the processes defined in them.
However, those KPIs are defined at a high level of abstraction and they must
be customised to the specific processes implemented in the organisation. The
same problem is found in web platforms such as KPILibrary3 , whose KPIs are
also defined at a very high level of abstraction. In addition, in these platforms
?
This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER), the
Spanish and the Andalusian R&D&I programmes (grants TIN2012-32273 (TAPAS),
TIC-5906 (THEOS) and P12-TIC-1867 (COPAS))
3
http://www.kpilibrary.com
Copyright © 2014 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic
purposes.
2 Manuel Resinas et al.
there is a lack of discussion and collaboration concerning the definition of KPIs,
a huge amount of duplicated KPIs and little information about the goodness of
the KPIs defined.
To overcome these problems we present KPIshare (http://kpishare.co),
which is an online collaborative space aimed at providing the BPM commu-
nity with a knowledge base of well-defined, mature KPIs and a place to discuss,
collaborate and create process-related KPIs that are applicable in real busi-
ness situations. To this end, two novel features have been implemented in the
platform, namely: a detailed structure for KPI definition based on templates fol-
lowing the SMART criteria [5, 6] and the concept of operational KPI challenges,
which is the cornerstone of the content found on the platform and enables users
to crowdsource solutions for their process measurement questions.
The remaining of this paper is structured as follows. In the next section,
we detail the platform and describe mechanism behind the operational KPI
challenges. In Section 3, we describe the main design goals of KPIshare and
how it supports them. Finally, Section 4 discuss the maturity of the tool and its
signficance to the BPM community.
2 The platform: KPI challenges
The content found on the platform revolves around solving operational KPI
challenges. The goal of a KPI challenge is to complete the description of a KPI
that fulfills some operational and/or strategic goal set by the user that raise the
challenge. In this sense, a KPI challenge can be seen as a process measurement
question that is raised by users of the platform to the community, the KPI
challengers, while other users of the platform, the KPI solvers, provide solutions
to the challenge. Furthermore, all KPI challenges solved constitute an evolving
KPI knowledge base that can be used not only as a library of KPIs but also for
educational purposes.
Next, we detail the high-level overview of the user flow we will aim at pre-
senting in the demo for each of these two types of users.
2.1 KPI Challenger: Raising a KPI challenge
Enterprise business professionals have trouble finding the best way to measure
the performance of the process they manages. They look for a crowdsourced
solution, so they log on to KPIshare and look if their question is already answered
in the KPI repository. If they do not find a suitable answer, they may decide to
raise their own KPI challenge. To this end, they document their situation – the
industry they work in, the process they want to measure and the strategic or
operational goal they want to achieve (e.g., Ensure customer satisfaction; Avoid
overdue orders; Decrease expenses) – and they leave blank the fields they are
looking an answer for. These fields are defined so that the user is encouraged to
follow the SMART criteria, which is a recommended criteria for KPIs [2, 7], and
include the measurement definition and units of measure; the target of the KPI
KPIshare 3
and the filter, which specifies the process instances that must be considered to
compute the KPI value are defined [6].
SMART is a mnemonic that broadly conforms to the following words: Spe-
cific, it has to be clear what the KPI exactly describes and the context within
which it is defined; Measurable, it has to be possible to measure a current value
and to compare it to the target one; Achievable, it makes no sense to pursue
a goal that will never be met; Relevant, it must be aligned with a part of the
organisation’s strategy, something that really a↵ects its performance; and Time-
bounded, a KPI only has a meaning if the time period in which it is measured
is known.
Note that what makes a KPI challenge di↵erent from a classical Questions
& Answers forum is that the KPI challenge provides these predefined fields as a
structure that frames the process measurement questions and solutions.
2.2 KPI solver: Contributing to a KPI challenge
Users who want to spread their knowledge and promote best practices, usu-
ally process measurement specialists – consultants and academics –, log on to
KPIshare, search or browse all KPI challenges raised in the platform and con-
tribute to them by completing some or all of the fields of the KPI structure left
blank by the KPI challenger. In addition, they can comment on resolved KPIs,
vote for the community answers they find valuable and report all answers they
find wrong or inadequate.
Ultimately, the continuous contributions of the two user types – KPI chal-
lenger and KPI solver – creates an ecosystem of knowledge exchange, which
moderates itself. Best practices are promoted by users of stature to reshape or
replace common practices, leading to continuous innovation in the field of process
measurement and analytics.
3 Design goals
To make KPIshare a platform capable of providing a knowledge base of well-
defined, mature, process-related KPIs, we have designed it according to the
following design goals:
Design goal 1: Promote the creation of well-defined process-related KPIs. One of
the problems of similar platforms is that many KPIs are incomplete or do not
provide enough detail to be able to understand and apply them in a concrete
scenario, which may hinder its usefulness. To avoid this problem, in KPIshare
each KPI follows a template that encourage users to define KPIs that follows
the SMART criteria as detailed in [6].
Design goal 2: Foster the collaboration amongst users. KPIshare is a social-
based platform in the sense that its contents are provided by their users. In
order to foster the collaboration amongst users, KPIshare introduces the concept
4 Manuel Resinas et al.
of KPI challenge as a mechanism to promote the interaction between users.
In addition, the fact that all KPIs have the same structure makes it easier
to collaborate in its fulfillment as it has been shown in other fields such as
Requirement Engineering [1].
Design goal 3: Inform about the quality of the KPIs. KPI quality is enforced
mostly by the community and its ability to vote for good quality answers and
discard low quality information. This method is successfully implemented and
used across di↵erent online communities and forums, such as Yahoo Answers,
Quora and StackOverflow. As a second level of policing, discussions are moder-
ated by members of KPIshare and a board of experts.
4 Maturity and Relevance to BPM
To the best of our knowledge, no other similar platform exists to define process-
related KPIs. KPIshare has been developed from research results on how to
define process KPIs in a user-friendly manner, and its main novelty lies in the
collaborative way of defining them, so that experts can interact and contribute
to others’ KPI definitions. Thus, KPIshare enable its users to have easy access
to a knowledge base of well defined, mature KPIs that are above all “business
valuable”.
Maturity. The KPIshare platform is currently in a closed beta phase, in which
some experts have been invited to test the platform. The major risk identified in
this phase is the anticipated difficulty during the implementation of the opera-
tional KPIs defined in a KPI challenge. The group of experts interviewed during
the development of KPIshare outlined repeatedly the very complex, larger con-
text within which KPIs exist, the need for options to map and link the processes
within this context, as well as the option to link them with the enterprises strate-
gic visions. In order for this linkage to occur, BPM professionals should be given
an option to observe the “layers” of the KPIs: Even if the process is small, it
would need to be linked to a bigger “mission”, a bigger KPI. The experts have
noted that KPIs are the concrete measurements that have a high correlation or
even causality with strategic, as well as operational goals. The certainty of the
correlation between textually expressed goals and more tangible measurements
(KPI) is a precondition for ensuring the right support for the measurement pro-
cess and performance. To mitigate this risk, KPIshare enforces the user to set
the context of the KPI and to link it to operational and strategic goals during
the definition of the challenge as detailed. However, more empirical evidence is
necessary to evaluate the e↵ectiveness of this measure.
In addition, KPIshare also presents some limitations that need to be ad-
dressed, such as dealing with a potentially unclear or conflicting understanding
of KPIs and the way they are defined. Such disparate views can occur when KPIs
are interpreted by di↵erent people in di↵erent business situations. Another lim-
itation lies in the detection of duplicate KPIs. In this sense, semi-automated
KPIshare 5
mechanisms to detect such duplicates are planned to be integrated in the plat-
form.
Significance to the BPM Field. KPIshare follows an approach that will both re-
solve many issues that are currently troubling BPM professionals, as well as push
forward the idea that process measurement is the only way to improve overall
business performance. It provides a place where users can discuss, collaborate
and create SMART KPIs that are applicable in real business situations. It is
through this platform that we want to share our own unique vision of how only
by getting and giving feedback, you continuously improve your work processes.
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