Defining Process Performance Indicators By Using Templates and Patterns

Abstract

Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset for the mea- 2 surement of the achievement of strategic and operational goals in process–oriented 3 organisations. Ideally, the definition of PPIs should not only be unambiguous, 4 complete, and understandable to non–technical stakeholders, but also traceable 5 to business processes and verifiable by means of automated analysis. in practice, 6 PPIs are defined either informally in natural language, with its well–known prob- 7 lems, or at a very low level, or too formally, becoming thus hardly understand- 8 able to managers and users. in order to solve this problem, in this paper, a novel 9 approach to improve the definition of PPIs using templates and ontology–based 10 linguistic patterns is proposed. Its main benefits are that it is easy to learn, pro- 11 motes reuse, reduces ambiguities and missing information, is understandable to 12 all stakeholders and maintains traceability with the process model. Furthermore, 13 since it relies on a formal ontology based on Description Logics, it is possible 14 to perform automated analysis and infer knowledge regarding the relationships 15 between PPI definitions and other process elements.