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.