A Framework for Instrumentation and Integration of Process Performance Management

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Our increasingly on-line and wireless-connected world makes it ever more feasible to collect data to monitor business processes as they are taking place. Managers and workers should be able to access and react to that data while the business process is taking place to ensure quality, safety, security, regulatory compliance and improve performance. Unfortunately, the performance management frameworks that enterprises currently use to collect and communicate such data typically make the data available after the fact. In practice, there is a significant organizational and architectural gap between information technology that supports online business processes, and information technology that supports performance management frameworks. The two are usually addressed independently of each other when building information systems. As a result, essential relationships between business processes and performance management are poorly communicated. Enterprises know at a high level how well business processes performed after the fact, but the insight as to which combination of steps in a process contributed to success or failure is often uncertain or communicated too late. Healthcare process performance management with a focus on quality of care (wait times, readmission rates, infection rates, patient satisfaction) is an application area for this research as is aeronautics process performance management with a focus on safety. Security and regulatory compliance are important to both as well. Our long term objective is a comprehensive information technology framework for process performance management that can provide dynamic statistical control and surveillance of business processes to ensure quality, safety, security, compliance, and performance that is accessible to managers and workers alike, while those business processes are taking place. The framework must provide a sufficient level of sophistication so that process performance management can be fully integrated and instrumented into the day to day operations and management of business processes in complex situations such as health care and aeronautics process performance management. A major hypothesis at the core of our research is that process performance management applications should be defined and implemented independently of the business processes they monitor and the performance management frameworks that communicate overall enterprise performance. By having a flexible, well-defined architectural integration point between the two, a process performance management application can be concisely and precisely defined that manages the relationship between operational business processes and strategic enterprise goals. This will enable the application to be flexibly and efficiently developed, deployed and updated on a continuous basis as the business processes and strategic goals of an enterprise evolve. Our research will focus on three short term objectives that support our long term objective. PPM Meta-model: development of an application meta-model and a model-driven approach for generating process performance management (PPM) applications. PPM Architecture: development of a PPM engine to execute PPM applications and a catalog of patterns for integrating the engine with business process and performance management architecture. PPM Methodology: development of a test-driven methodology for building PPM applications that ensure quality, safety, security, compliance, and performance as processes and strategic goals evolve. All three short term objectives will be validated using case studies and design science research methodology in complex domains such as healthcare or aeronautics process performance management.