Evaluation of Business Processes: Where to Start?

Evaluation concepts for running and completed business processes are quite mature, especially for executable business processes. Evaluation of business processes at design time is still rather ambiguous, although the importance of evaluation in an early phase of the business process lifecycle is widely recognized. Considering the concept of business process lifecycles an emphasis therefore has to be on evaluation approaches for the design phase. The design phase is a cyclic procedure of modeling and evaluation and results in an evaluated business process model that is forwarded to the implementation phase. Considering literature from a workflow-view and a business-view, three evaluation functions were identified. Synergizing these functions in an approach of verification, validation and optimization (VV&O) assures a correct, valid and optimized business process model in the design phase.