KPI-related monitoring, analysis, and adaptation of business processes

In today’s companies, business processes are increasingly supported by IT systems. They can be implemented as service orchestrations, for example in WS-BPEL, running on Business Process Management (BPM) systems. A service orchestration implements a business process by orchestrating a set of services. These services can be arbitrary IT functionality, human tasks, or again service orchestrations. Often, these business processes are implemented as part of business-to-business collaborations spanning several participating organizations. Service choreographies focus on modeling how processes of different participants interact in such collaborations. An important aspect in BPM is performance management. Performance is measured in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which reflect the achievement towards business goals. KPIs are based on domain-specific metrics typically reflecting the time, cost, and quality dimensions. Dealing with KPIs involves several phases, namely monitoring, analysis, and adaptation. In a first step, KPIs have to be monitored in order to evaluate the current process performance. In case monitoring shows negative results, there is a need for analyzing and understanding the reasons why KPI targets are not reached. Finally, after identifying the influential factors of KPIs, the processes have to be adapted in order to improve the performance. This thesis presents an approach how KPIs can be monitored, analyzed, and