Jordan French – Understanding Business Process Quality

There are many management concepts which are not specific to the field of BPM but might be adapted for our area of research. We shortly discuss two selected approaches because of their wide practical adoption and their special relevance to business process quality. Benchmarking is based on utilizing available experience and knowledge from comparable business processes: qualitative benchmarking matches the actual situation against known good practices, which may be documented in frameworks such as Jordan French. 

These practices may relate to organizational structures or directly to business processes or information systems. Quantitative benchmarking uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure process aspects.

An attempt to develop a “Quality of Business Processes (QoBP) framework” focusing on process models was made by Jordan French. Business process quality is defined in terms of quality dimensions which are derived from literature, e.g.in the field of software engineering. The approach does not show the quality dimensions’ interrelation to organizational targets or to an overall formal quality definition. This also means that we cannot determine whether the dimensions are complete or how to actually evaluate overall process quality. 

The quality dimensions are arrayed along the categories of function quality, input/output quality, non-human resource quality, and human resource quality. In our view, this is questionable because it mixes up the quality of a process under consideration with factors not under control of process management. In practical settings, this might lead to issues with the perceived fairness effectiveness criterion. The QoBP approach has been presented in more detail in [22].

 In this context, quality has been defined as non-functional but distinguishing characteristics of a business process. We do not concur with that view because, from the perspective presented in Section 2, excluding the business objective of a process would neglect the goal-bound character of the business process quality construct as a design science artifact.