Business Process Monitoring and Alignment: An Approach Based on the User Requirements Notation and Business Intelligence Tools

Monitoring business activities using Business Intelligence (BI) tools is a well-established concept. However, online process monitoring is an emerging area which helps organizations not only plan for future improvements but also change and alter their current ongoing processes before problems happen. In this paper, we explore how monitoring process performance can help evolve process goals and requirements. We elaborate an approach that uses the User Requirements Notation (URN) to model the goals and processes of the organization, and to monitor and align processes against their goals. A BI tool exploiting an underlying data warehouse provides the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) used to measure the satisfaction of goals and process requirements. Feeding this information into the URN modeling tool, we can analyze the consequences of current business activities on desired business goals, which can be used for process and business activity alignment thereafter. We illustrate the approach with a case study from the healthcare sector: a hospital discharge process.