Business Process Re-design with DEMO

Abstract The introduction of the idea of Business Process Re-engineering in the late 1980’s has resulted inan explosion of the literature. In practice the success rates of re-engineering projects is low sincethe majority of the approaches are founded on a functional understanding of business systems. Tobe really effective however, business system transformation needs to be founded in aconstructional perspective on business systems. The DEMO methodology provides a theoreticalfoundation and a modelling facility to reveal the construction of business systems. In the currentpaper, techniques for optimising business systems on the basis of the constructional DEMOmodels are presented and illustrated. 1 Introduction Although business system transformation initiatives have been with us since the early 1990’s, the success rateshave been low (Malhortra, 1996). There are several reasons proposed for these failures, which include the lack ofpractical methodologies (Malhortra, 1996) and consequently project management mistakes (Bashein et al, 1994).Based on interviews in more than 200 companies and 35 reengineering initiatives, Davenport and Stoddard(1994) state that the popularity is based on myths. A more fundamental critique on the current approaches tobusiness system transformation argues that traditional functional approaches lack the constructionalunderstanding to business systems. Understanding of the construction of business systems is considered to be anecessary precondition for successfully carrying out organisational transformation projects (Dietz, Mulder,1998).Business systems can be viewed from two perspectives: the black-box and the white-box perspective. Theblack-box conceptualisation of a business system exclusively deals with the external behaviour of a system, i.e.with the effects of the activity and with the mutual influences between the system and its environment. The blackbox-model of a business system is very appropriate and sufficient for dealing with management issues focusingon controlling the behaviour of the system. Flow models like the Data Flow Diagram and the ISAC A-graph, andmore recently Use-cases, are well known examples based on the black-box conceptualisation of businesssystems. In contrast, a white-box perspective on business systems deals with the system’s internal operations andworking principles. It is this type of understanding that is needed for transformation of business systems (Dietz,Mulder, 1998).In this article the application of the white-box principle to the modelling of business systems is exploredin more detail and is put into practice. In section two an overview of a business system modelling methodologyfrom a white-box perspective is provided. In section three model-based techniques for business systemoptimisation are discussed, while section four illustrates these techniques by way of an example. Finally insection five some implications are described and conclusions are drawn.