extending business process management to determine efficient it investments
In many sectors, companies model and optimize their business processes in order to better manage the external value that comes from these processes. Supporting the execution of corporate business processes with an optimal set of IT investments is crucial to a company's success. However, existing business process management (BPM) approaches do not integrate methods for evaluating and selecting efficient IT investments and traditional evaluation methods are often inadequate. This paper proposes an extension that aims at a more adequate valuation, allocation, and selection of IT investments with respect to the requirements of the given corporate business processes. Such an extension allows decision makers in process-oriented organizations to interactively determine and continually optimize IT investments. At the same time, the extension improves the decision makers' awareness of the efficiency of their investments and, thus, reduces the gap between technology and business by further completing the traditional BPM methodology. This paper implements such an approach in a decision support system and illustrates its application by means of an example.
business process management decision support business it alignment