Continuous improvement of business processes realized by services based on execution measurement

Business Process Management (BPM) is being rapidly adopted by organizations wanting to focus on their business processes as key elements for controlling and improving the way they perform their business. The realization of business processes by services also helps in the improvement of their implementation, by decoupling the definition level from the technical one. In this article we present an approach to the continuous business process improvement based on execution measurement. It comprises an execution measurement model defining several measures for business process and service execution, and a continuous improvement process to guide the introduction of improvements. We have integrated several different approaches, techniques and methodologies in a single proposal to guide the improvement effort in an organization, providing support for business people from the definition to the analysis of the execution measures defined.