Perspectives on Process Documentation - a Case Study

The documentation of IT projects is of paramount importance for the lasting benefit of a project’s outcome. However, different forms of documentation are needed to comply with the diverse needs of users. In order to avoid the maintenance of numerous versions of the same documentation, an integrated method from the field of reference modeling creating perspectives on configurable models is presented and evaluated against a case in the field of health care. The proposal of a holistic to-be model for process documentation provides useful hints towards the need of presenting a model that relates to a specific user’s perspective. Moreover, it helps to evaluate the applicability of configurable, company-specific models concerning the relative operating efficiency. 1 RESEARCH APPROACH AND CASE SCENARIO The documentation of IT projects, e. g. software development or process reengineering, is of paramount importance for the lasting benefit of a project’s outcome. But different forms of documentation are needed to comply with the diverse needs of users who use information model for different purposes. A system engineer for instance is in need of different information than a manager or a trainee. These problems are similar to those from the field of reference modeling where large overall process models have to be adapted to companyspecific contexts. To assist this model adjustment several model customization techniques have been discussed that allow the adaptation for various purposes. However, the applicability to large companyspecific models has not been further investigated. Thus, these configuration techniques are discussed mainly in the field of reference modeling. Their applicability to company-specific models in terms of process documentation for process management purposes seems to be promising nonetheless. In the year 1996 the Bayer AG, a Germanybased global enterprise in the fields of health care, nutrition, and innovative materials, settled on a comprehensive framework for a corporate-wide rollout of the standard software SAP R/3. In the run-up all major processes were analyzed and documented. This provided an ideal basis for a thorough ex-post analysis and allowed meaningful propositions for a future appearance of the process documentation that allow the utilization of the information for different purposes. The Bayer Business Services GmbH assisted us greatly in the analysis of their documentation and provided us with any input requested. We thankfully acknowledge their support in this project. Thus, the research questions for the following are in detail: • Which possibilities exist to allow a contextoriented preparation of process documentations or process models? • In which way can they be applied at the Bayer AG? • Is the utilization of context-oriented process documentations beneficial for the Bayer AG? If so, does the concept sound promising for other companies as well? 46 Becker J., Janiesch C., Delfmann P. and Fuhr W. (2005). PERSPECTIVES ON PROCESS DOCUMENTATION A Case Study. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 46-56 DOI: 10.5220/0002543900460056 Copyright c © SciTePress The structure of the paper mirrors this. At first, the idea of configurative modeling and its related work is elaborated upon. Then a comprehensive asis analysis is conducted whose findings result in the proposition of a holistic to-be model. Hereon the need for configurable models at the Bayer AG is identified as well as the application of possible occurrences is presented and discussed in detail. 2 CONFIGURATIVE MODELING AND RELATED WORK 2.1 Perspectives on Process Models According to the Total Quality Management (TQM) approach, the quality of a product is determined by its fitness-for-use for the consumer and his requirements (Ishikawa, 1985). When transferred to process models, their quality depends on the fitness-for-use concerning the requirements of particular users or user groups. User requirements result from their different perspectives on business processes (Rosemann et al., 2005), (Nissen et al., 1996), (Rosemann and Green, 2000). A perspective is determined by the deliberate and specific use of a business process model, the organizational role of a user as well as individual preferences on the conceptual and representational design of business process models (Becker et al., 2002). See Figure 1 for an overview of specific purposes of process models. The more effective the process model meets the requirements of a particular perspective, the higher is its quality. Ideally, each identified perspective should be provided with a tailor-made version of a process model. This approach is called multiperspective process modeling (Darke and Shanks, 1996), (Rosemann, 1998), (Becker et al., 2002). Cf. (Rosemann et al., 2005). Figure 1: Specific Purposes of Process Models 2.2 Related Work on Model Adaptation In order to enable multi-perspective information modeling, different approaches of model adaptation have been developed in the past. Some approaches focus on model transformation, as they are proclaimed by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) (Soley and OMG Staff Strategy Group, 2000)). Implementations of model transformation mechanisms can be found in the form of so-called Meta CASE Tools like the Generic Modeling Environment (GME) (Agrawal et al., 2002), (Ledeczi et al., 2001) and Metaview (Findeisen, 1994). Model transformation aims at generating a destination model out of an original model, whereas the languages of both models can diverge extensively. Structural patterns are identified in the model of the initial modeling language via an algorithmic search and they are transformed into equivalent patterns of a model of the targeted modeling language. Transformations are performed by using transformation rules that are defined for each combination of the original and destination language (Engels et al., 1997). Model transformation approaches are characterized by a high universality of the operators used for the definition of transformation rules (e. g. Create New, RePERSPECTIVES ON PROCESS DOCUMENTATION A Case Study