Improving Process Agility with Process Repositoriesfor Business Process Modeling

摘要

As organizations continue to manage growth by developing a diverse portfolio of products and services in semiautonomousrnbusiness units, they become increasingly fragmented internally. Such fragmentation results in highly diversified businessrnprocesses for performing similar activities, leading to reduced operational efficiency, coordination, and information sharing.rnHorizontal business process integration entails change in temporal and spatial dimensions to mitigate this problem andrnidentify common processes to help achieve synergies. Current research on Business Process Management has not paid muchrnattention to enabling this activity. Motivated by this concern, the primary objective of my dissertation is: “how horizontalrnintegration of business processes is achieved by semiautonomous business units to realize the benefits of better operationalrnefficiency, information sharing, and coordination?” Using a two-phased approach I address this objective. In the first phase Irndevelop a process theory of BPM in horizontal integration using grounded theory methodology. Also, this study identifies thernrich contextual knowledge that is necessary to understand and reuse business process fragments. This study was conducted inrna very large U.S. corporation as a part of an initiative to identify core processes in a multi-billion dollar supply chain process.rnBased on the findings of the first phase, in the second phase I develop a decision support system to aid process designers tornhelp find similarities in process models. The effectiveness of the system for improving performance in business processrnmodeling activities is evaluated using an experiment.