Decision Enabling Potential of a Business Process

Ability of a business process to meet organisational objectives determines the organisational effectiveness, and in turn, is determined by the efficiency of the process as well as effective decision-making within the process. A concept of a decision-enabled process introduced by Neiger & Churilov (2002) lays down the foundation for a modelling method that can be used to combine process modelling and decision modelling qualities to better achieve overall organisational objectives. As decision enabling a process is likely to increase costs and complexity of business information systems, in order to justify the implementation of this methodology in practice it is essential to understand how decision enabling benefits an organisation and which factors influence whether these benefits are realised. This paper discusses the benefits of decision enabling and, to assist with determining whether an organisation would realise these benefits, a formal framework to identify the decision enabling potential of a business process is proposed.