Aligning Business Processes and Information Systems

Business processes and information systems mutually affect each other in non-trivial ways. Frequently, processes are designed without taking the systems' impact into account, and vice versa. Missing alignment at design-time results in quality problems at run-time. Robert Heinrich gives examples from research and practice for an integrated design of process and system quality. A quality reference-model characterizes process quality and a process notation is extended to operationalize the model. Simulation is a powerful means to predict the mutual quality impact, to compare design alternatives, and to verify them against requirements. The author describes two simulation approaches and discusses interesting insights on their application in practice.

Robert Heinrich is head of the Continuous Quality Engineering research group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He is interested in quality modeling, analysis, and evolution of processes and systems, with a focus on industrial application. This was also the topic of his doctoral thesis created at University of Heidelberg.