Re-designing process architectures towards a framework of design dimensions

Organizations rely on a multiplicity of processes covering everything from their day-to-day functioning to longer term viability. Together, these processes and their interrelationships constitute the business process architecture (BPA) of the organization. While efforts have been dedicated to the analysis and design of business processes, the question of how processes in an organization should best relate to each other (i.e., the design of the BPA) has received relatively little consideration. Supported by technological and business innovations, the torrent of changes faced by today's organizations, forces them to stop looking at their processes individually and focus on designing BPAs, especially concentrating on balancing flexibility/agility and other objectives, such as cost and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a framework for BPA design with several dimensions along which activities or decisions could potentially be repositioned across processes and a goal-driven approach for analyzing possible BPA configurations.