Bpm1

Business Process Monitoring and Alignment: An Approach Based on the User Requirements Notation and Business Intelligence Tools
Alireza Pourshahid Daniel Amyot SITE, University of Ottawa apour024@uottawa.ca damyot@site.uottawa.ca Pengfei Chen Michael Weiss SCS, Carleton University pchen@connect.carleton.ca weiss@scs.carleton.ca Alan J. Forster Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa OttawaHealth Research Institute aforster@ohri.ca

Abstract
Monitoring business activities using Business Intelligence (BI) tools is a well-established concept. However, online process monitoring is an emerging area which helps organizations not only plan for future improvements but also change and alter their current ongoing processes before problems happen. In this paper, we explore how monitoringprocess performance can help evolve process goals and requirements. We elaborate an approach that uses the User Requirements Notation (URN) to model the goals and processes of the organization, and to monitor and align processes against their goals. A BI tool exploiting an underlying data warehouse provides the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) used to measure the satisfaction of goals and processrequirements. Feeding this information into the URN modeling tool, we can analyze the consequences of current business activities on desired business goals, which can be used for process and business activity alignment thereafter. We illustrate the approach with a case study from the healthcare sector: a hospital discharge process.

one of their companies’ top priorities. Business processimprovement reduces costs, increases revenues, motivates employees, and satisfies customers. In this paper we introduce a new method for improving processes and evolving their goals and requirements. This method combines business process modeling and activity monitoring concepts. It takes advantage of the User Requirements Notation (URN) [1][14] to express and reason about business goals and processperformance requirements. This method also enables organizations to align their processes with their business goals. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are used to measure how well processes satisfy their goals, and a URN tool combined to a commercial business intelligence tool support the automation of the monitoring. Basic concepts and previous work related to business process management and URN,with an emphasis on healthcare processes, are first recalled in section 2. The core of our new method, with concepts, steps, and KPIs integrated to URN models, is introduced in section 3. To illustrate and (to some extent) validate this approach, the implementation and results of a monitoring system for a realistic healthcare case study (hospital discharge process) are presented in section 4.Conclusions and items identified as future work are discussed in section 5.

1.

Introduction 2. Literature review
Business process management and tools 2.1

Businesses are subject to a variety of external events that need quick actions and responses to ensure their survival and growth. One of the most important strategies is to make core business processes agile and flexible. Flexibilityenables appropriate response time for today’s event-driven business environments [5]. In addition, businesses need to establish process monitoring mechanisms to get updated information about their business processes and to improve their decision making capabilities [16]. According to Rudden [27], over 1,400 Chief Information Officers identified business process improvement as

In [4], a businessprocess is defined as a “coordinated chain of activity intended to produce a business result.” In addition, it can be considered as a “repeating cycle that reaches a business goal” [8]. A process usually has several steps that are performed by multiple individuals across an organization. Simple processes usually target a single functional unit of an organization. End-to-end business processes,...