UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMIC INTERACTIONS BETWEEN BP AND IT USING SIMULATION

摘要

Business Process (BP) design approaches claim that Information Technology (IT) is a major enabler of business process, a view also shared by the Information Systems (IS) community. Despite this fact, approaches in these domains do not provide clear indication of which modelling techniques could be used to detect IT opportunities within a business process context. This paper examines the advantages and limitations of a simulation framework used in a research project, namely ASSESS-IT, that aimed to depict relationships between BP and IT. It provides evidence that for some cases the relationships between BP and IT can be viewed by focusing in the relationship between BP and IS alone and assess the feasibility of using an alternative framework, namely BPISS, to address this relationship. Finally, this paper provides evidence that the BPISS framework could help BP and IS analyst to assess the benefits, or constraints, that the functionality of a given IS design may bring to the BP.