Quality of Process ? A Business Process Perspective on Quality of Service

The fundamental paradigm shift from a product-to a service-oriented economy implies novel technical and organizational challenges. The resulting dynamic of the technical infrastructure and the increasing development towards requesting external business services to be integrated into end-to-end business processes requires mechanisms ensuring the reliability of the organization's composed services, workflows and business processes. From a business perspective, QoS characteristics defined based on technical services within the infrastructural layer have to be aggregated to more business-relevant Key Performance Indicators on business process layer to express the Quality of Process. These KPIs represent quality that is highly related to the business's performance (e.g. processing time of a business service) and are crucial for achieving predefined goals in order to stay competitive in the market. The contribution of this paper is threefold: We (i) provide an in-depth requirements analysis for such a holistic quality management framework, we (ii) develop a holistic aggregation framework which enables service level aggregation incorporating the loosely coupled structure of business processes with invoked systems and services in an instance based manner. To demonstrate the expressive power of our framework we (iii) provide an exemplary industrial application scenario and illustrate the functioning and interplay of the designed artifacts.