Business Process Management – A Traditional Approach Versus a Knowledge Based Approach

Abstract

The enterprise management represents a heterogeneous aggregate of both resources and assets that need to be coordinated and orchestrated in order to reach the goals related to the business mission. Influences and forces that may influence this process, and also for that they should be considered, are not concentrated in the business environment, but they are related to the entire
operational context of a company. For this reason, business processes must be the most versatile and flexible with respect to the changes that occur within the whole operational context of a company.
Considering the supportive role that information systems play in favour of Business Process Management - BPM, it is also essential to implement a constant, continuous and quick mechanism for the information system alignment with respect to the evolution followed by business processes.
In particular, such mechanism must intervene on BPM systems in order to keep them aligned and compliant with respect to both the context changes and the regulations. In order to facilitate this alignment mechanism, companies are already referring to the support offered by specific solutions, such as knowledge bases. In this context, a possible solution might be the approach we propose, which is based on a specific framework called Process Management System. Our methodology implements a knowledge base support for business experts, which is not limited to the BPM operating phases, but includes also the engineering and prototyping activities of the corresponding information system. This paper aims to compare and evaluate a traditional BPM approach with respect to the
approach we propose. In effect, such analysis aims to emphasize the lack of traditional methodology especially with respect to the alignment between business processes and information systems, along with their compliance with context domain and regulations.