Accountability Centered Approach to Business Process Reengineering

In this paper, Accountability Centered Approach (ACA) is proposed for business process engineering. The ACA approach enables the designers and users to focus on the requirements and rationales of the process design, before settling into selecting and committing to a set of activities. The approach indicates iterative decomposition of accountability to appropriate levels and mapping of subaccountabilities into activities. Appropriate activities are then selected to form network of activities which result in the design of the process. It differs from the traditional modeling approaches which often start and finish the process (re)design with tasks or activities. The major contribution of ACA for process design and engineering is in three folds: 1) providing a complete framework integrating accountability and activity in one method; 2) defining activities with specification of inter-relationships among activities, and information flow based on IDEF3 construct, constraint, object, and dependency; and 3) furnishing a verification method to validate process design or compare merits of different design alternatives. As an illustrative example, the Account Payable case of Ford Motor Company is illustrated by using this approach. The results demonstrate that the ACA approach offers clarity and provides users with opportunities to improve quality of design.