Building ontology based knowledge maps to assist business process re-engineering

a r t i c l e i n f o Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is being used to improve the efficiency of the organizational processes, however, a number of obstacles have prevented its full potential from being realised. One of these obstacles is caused by an emphasis on the business process itself at the exclusion of considering other important knowledge of the organization. Another is due to the lack of tools for identifying the cause of the inefficiencies and inconsistencies in BPR. In this paper we propose a methodology for BPR that overcomes these two obstacles through the use of a formal organizational ontology and knowledge structure and source maps. These knowledge maps are represented formally to facilitate an inferencing mechanism which helps to automatically identify the causes of the inefficiencies and inconsistencies. We demonstrate the applicability of this methodology through the use of a case study of a university domain. Business process re-engineering (BPR) has been defined as the fundamental rethinking and radical design of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed [18]. Although there were high expectations for the improvements in performance that BPR would bring about for organizations, in many cases these benefits were not realised and high failure rates (e.g. 70%) have been reported [2, 5, 27]. The reasons for these high failure rates have been debated and a number of factors have been posited as to why these expected benefits have not been realised. One factor is the focus on the steps in the business process (e.g. business process diagrams) at the exclusion of the environment within which the process is carried out [42]. In considering the environment organizations will be faced with the challenge of making certain types of knowledge visible to relevant stakeholders. Another factor is that although there are a number of tools for modelling the business processes, many of these tools only support diagrammatic and mathematical modelling [39]. While these models are useful for understanding the business processes, they do not support the automated analysis for identifying the cause of inefficiencies in the business process, which is considered to be one of the most time consuming stages of BPR [1, 39]. This research addresses the issues of the lack of understanding of the environment within which the business process exists and of automating the identification of the inefficiencies …