Selected Journal Article

Discuss about the Business process analytics and change.

Business process analytics is useful for businesses to achieve end-to-end visibility and real-time to complicated business processes. These processes have their extensions both under and outside the organizations. They have provided decision makers, related stakeholders and process participants with the insights of effectiveness and efficiency of organizational processes.

The following report reviews a selected journal detailing reactions, impressions and thoughts on the article. Then a lengthy review is demonstrated on business process management and change providing critique individual ideas.

The selected journal article:

Name: Business process architectures: overview, comparison and framework

Authors: Remco Dijkman, Irene Vanderfeesten and Hajo A. Reijers

The businesses processes are denoted as the lifeline of businesses. Examples of this include claims processing in healthcare, order lifecycle management under retail and trade settlements in financials. These things have been critical from the perspective of customer experience. Moreover, this critical characteristic of a business process is also seen from the perspective of compliance, regulatory and top line.

It seen that, with the advent of current business process modelling, there is a rising demand for guidelines leading to integrated and consistent to various collections of various models. This idea of business process architecture has been long proposed in the article to address the areas. Besides, multiple evaluations of use and usability of different identified approaches are also discussed. At last, a framework is develoepd for designing business process architecture is provided here. This has been used for developing a concrete structure.

In the study, usability has been analyzed in two ways. The first one is done by surveying various practitioners. Here the opinion of these people was used and their usefulness has been analyzed. Apart from this, here four different case studies are conducted. Here, the process architectures from the practice have been investigated to find out the approaches used in their design. It is found from both the evaluations that practitioners have the preference to use approaches that have been lying by reference models and approaches. These have been on identifying of business objects and functions. Simultaneously, those evaluations have shown that the practitioners have used those methods in combination instead of selecting only one approach.

First of all the journal has helped me in understanding the differences between the uncertainty and various views among business users for making proper choices. It is seen that business process architecture has been equally effective. Some process architectures have been impeding on the process centred like to think that has been beyond  the initiative of a model process in the first phase. I have understood the gap between the guidelines and approaches for developing business process architecture. They are regarded as been very beneficial to practice and the ways they have been applied in practice. The study has focused on challenges, modelling-related problems in maintaining business process architecture. However, the study has focused on socio-political and organizational problems playing an important role in the proper usage of the process models.

Detailed Critical Reflection of the Above Journal

The above article has helped in understanding some contributions. The first thing is the overview of the design guidelines and approaches used to design effectively the business process architecture. Here, the second thing is the framework aggregated from current procedures that are used as the basis to structure the process architecture. To understand those contributions, a structured review is done in the journal article. The analysis has helped in understanding the design approaches and overview of guidelines along with structuring principles that are proposed by the approaches to creating process architecture. Various collections of opinions showed that practitioners have depended in a hybrid combination of the approaches instead of a single approach. Those outcomes have been helpful for me to investigate a specific combination of structuring principles, guidelines and procedures used in practice. These are done through examining process architectures from the method in the case studies. By the assessments of outcomes of the evaluation, the overviews of the favorite structuring principles are presented in the form of an active framework. The guidelines and developed structure have been remaining to be proved under practice. However, I think that they are subjective statements. The reason is that they have been always derived from literature and some more in-depth academic studies.

From this study, I have understood five distinct types of approaches. They areall  goal-based, along with action based and object-based. Apart from this they are also reference model-based and function based. Through those surveys, the actual use is explored and the perceived usefulness of different approaches. However, it is seen that the hybrid combination of guidelines has been the most popular response. By arranging various concepts and coverage of relations, here a process architecture framework is proposed. This has been a use for supporting the development of concrete process architecture.

Moreover, an unique contribution that nourished my ideas is the concrete approach of designing process architecture by empirical and theoretical knowledge of the scenario. Here, a theoretical basis is been found to be provided through various prior reviewed researches. On the other hand, the case studies and exploratory surveys have suggested that the business process architecture has combined various structuring methods. Here, the object-based structuring approaches and function-based approaches have appeared to be most useful. Further, here the practical evaluations have been disagreed over the usefulness of the various reference models. This is done as the primary structuring principle. This is because it is judged as one the most helpful approaches in the survey while it has not appeared in the previous case studies.

Design Guidelines and Approaches Used in Creating Business Process Architecture

Further, the evaluations from the case-study have suggested that the decomposition of a process in various dimensions has been possible here and the methods must be more generalized. The framework proposed has been developed on the basis of theoretical findings and accommodating those features that are derived from real life evaluations.  Those findings from the literature are to be perceived against those limitations. Here, at first, the research has been exploratory and thus I am drawing this conclusion with necessary caution. As the findings are lying by literature and an exploratory empirical task, they have remained validated much rigorously.

It has been highly interesting to repeat again and again every surveys in broader geographical context. However, I never expected this that it might lead to further insights. The evaluations of the study of the current approaches could be seen a high-level and context-free. The limitation is addressed to some extent by the in-depth case studies that are carried out. This has been mainly dealing with specific goals behind developing of process architecture and under industrial context. As for last, the findings shown in the study and use for process architecture has been considered mainly as the interest of large organizations. However, small businesses have discussed the topic to be a concerned interest. Regarding the essential limitations, a definite match is identified between the interest and contribution for designing business process architectures among various practitioners. It is seen that the outcome of this paper has been exploratory. Here, the first direction of the future work has been validating and testing of the usefulness of guidelines along with refining, validating and applying the suggested framework. Here, the smart way to move forward is to conduct field experiments aiming to evaluate whether the system can design industrially useful process smartly. Here, another project has been the development of a tool for supporting the simplicity of the application of the framework and the examples of various process architectures for collecting the real process model. Further, the guidelines for designing the business process architecture have provided a detailed understanding of business process architecture. Besides, developing the guidelines regarding creating a business process architecture it is an exciting topic at own right. A significant conclusion of the paper is finding that the practitioners have composed their approach to guidelines from multiple procedures. The authors have aimed to present an exhaustive account of architecture design. Mainly it has been a service-oriented approach in order to design business process architecture. This is because of the absence of such method that has also been noted in the study. Moreover, developing an effective service-oriented approach towards the business process architecture design has been always possible task for further work.

Distinct Types of Approaches for Designing Business Process Architecture

The enterprise architecture design and frameworks approaches have addressed the subsequent and diagram of enterprise architecture that consists of the description of components of interrelationships and enterprises. As per the approach used the business processes can also be included. For instance, the article has provided the instance of TOGAF or The Open Group Architecture Framework considering the business process as the part of enterprise architecture. Though the approach of enterprise architecture has been addressing the relation taking place between business process and components of enterprise architecture, this helps in designing business process architecture.  Apart from this, enterprise modelling languages can also be sued here to represent the enterprise architecture graphically. However, the study showed that the distinction between enterprise modelling language and its architecture has not been strict. In many cases, enterprise architectures have evolved from enterprise modelling language like ARIS and they are related to enterprise modelling language like TOGAF. The study has used the distinction to discuss the approaches of enterprise architecture and graphical ways to illustrate the outcomes. Here, enterprise modelling languages are used for representing business processes, their relations and relations to various other concepts. As a result, they are helpful and not focused on designing business process architecture.

Conclusion:

Thus it can be said that business process analytics has leveraged various event traces that are created from the infrastructure for generating metrics that feeds real-time dashboards, the predictive analytics instruments, historical reports like optimization and simulation tools. Further, at the core of those instruments lies a shared understanding of events. All these are created by process management platform followed by universal state model. As primary metrics like cycle times, utilization and frequencies are obtained through audit trial events, most of the decision-makers have needed the inclusion of relevant data for placing that process matrix under context. The various challenges for process analytics have existed as the form of an infrastructure system. This has not been much process-aware and contributing to the completion of business process and heterogeneity of event formats. Further, the domain knowledge is needed to design analytical models, whether they are a hypercube integrating various process and business data. Further, the mining models have been correlating the business-relevant attributes processing behavior and simulation and optimizing models reflecting the constraints of the actual world.

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