Towards a Business Process Management Governance Approach Using Process Model Templates and Flexibility

Organizations that include several organizational units with similar business processes often suffer, with time, from the proliferation of processes variant models that significantly deviate from the original (to be followed) one. Take, for instance, student enrolment processes on distinct faculties of the same university, or healthcare processes of a National Health Service across distinct health centers. This can lead to poor global (process) management, since measuring and improving processes can be difficult with too many variants of the same business process. Related works analyse the generalisation and flexibility aspects of process models and related variants, but do not deal with the overall process model lifecycle, especially for this kind of organizations. This paper introduces a novel approach for the Governance and continuous improvement of process models for this kind of organizations. The approach is based on the general Business Process Management (BPM) cycle for process models, proposing concrete techniques for the phases of evaluation, classification and analysis between real and concrete variant models from each organizational unit. It includes the use of similarity metrics and flexibility in business processes, and the main output is a continuously improved template process model. This template foresees a common process part (best practice-based) including process elements collected from the process model variants verified in organizational units, and a flexible part, referring to possible (controlled) deviations that can be tolerated by the organization's headquarters. This approach enhances overall business process management and associated resources by enforcing uniform (good) behavior across similar organizational units. We present the results of our approach applied to a real-world case study of home-healthcare related business process models.