A process-centric approach to enterprise transformation

Telecommunications service providers are faced with a rapidly changing business environment. They are being pushed to deal with global competition, reducing the cost of doing business, and rapidly developing new products and services. To meet these challenges, they must constantly modify their enterprise to optimize the way in which they do business. Business process re-engineering and continuous improvement methods target both the radical and continuous improvement of enterprise effectiveness. Because of the scope of change, the term "enterprise transformation" is often used to describe the scope of change required to organizations and systems. The paper presents a process-centric approach to addressing enterprise transformation. A process-centric approach is favoured because it is evolvable, scaleable, interoperable, modular and reconfigurable. The proposed solution, which encompasses the principles of a process-centric approach, has two levels of processes; local and global (enterprise). Local processes manage the presentation aspects in the user context. Enterprise level processes manage the overall information integration aspects. The paper describes a process-centric support system architecture that facilitates enterprise transformation. To maximize flexibility, processes are architecturally separated from the data required to support the execution of the process. This approach provides an architectural framework to flexibly support enterprise transformation.