Business Process Mapping

Marie-Therese Christiansson Assistant Professor/Senior Lecturer

Department of Information Systems and Project Management,

Faculty of Economic Sciences, Communication and IT,

Karlstad University, Sweden

Motivation

Organisations focusing more on the ‘e’ than on the ‘business’ may forget that value-added idea, the understanding of the organisational environment and IT as enabler in the business and customer context, as well as the changing requirements (Hammer, 1993; Davenport, 1993) are essential prerequisites for an organisation’s return on its investments in IT-solutions (Alpar and Olbrich, 2005).

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e-Services in business development

Business process mapping is key…

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A holistic and horizontal view on e-Services expanding beyond the front-end web site

to the back-office and the business processes performing services and

improving daily life for employees and customers

Business process mapping is key…

Business process mapping (describing and modelling) is a forum and tool for focusing, explaining, sharing, reflecting, learning and understanding e-Services in a co-design

• “The journey is the goal” and “The result is the goal”

Process descriptions can be used to specify e-Service solutions in the business and customer context to evaluate effects, test/simulation, design and develop solutions, purchase existing solutions, maintain and train as well as enable value realisation

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Challenges

How do we get process modelling (not only process documentation) to happen in practice?

How do we get business process descriptions to be usable and used in daily practice?•e-Service alignment (management, business and IT)

•Transparency

•Value realisation

•Interoperability

•…

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A Common Process ModelTo serve as a platform for how to think, describe and work towards process improvements based on a unified process mapping

A light-weight process methodology•pre-requisites•concepts•roles •a mapping structure

requesting, planning, conducting, completing

•directives •guidelines and •templates

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The Karlstad municipality approach

The Common Process Model is a “living model”, maintained and continually updated by a model owner

•based on research by Karlstad University, best practices and experiences gained by the employees

•designed to be employed in “all” business development projects, major as well as minor efforts, and be operative without one tool as a driving force

•designed to enable communication in “the same language” (concepts, symbols and construction in process descriptions) in business development initiatives in and between organisations

• 9 administrations and 7 corporations

•constitutes a knowledge base that all employees can access via tools and intranet

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The Karlstad municipality approach

Working according to the Common Process Model will generate process descriptions in a way that will ensure progression in Business Process Management (to identify & describe, establish, measure & improve, monitor)

a success factor is that employees and management understand

the “process thinking” for the process orientation to work

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Research in e-Services

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Challenges concerning e-Services?

Thank you for your attention!