Towards an Evaluation Framework for Business Process Integration and Management

Process-awareness in enterprise computing is a must in order to adequately support business processes. Particularly the interoperability of the (process-oriented) business information systems and the management of a company’s process map are difficult to handle. Process-oriented approaches (like workflow systems and enterprise application integration tools) offer promising perspectives in this respect. However, a major problem for project managers is the accomplishment of economic-oriented assessments of such approaches. Currently, there exists no suitable evaluation framework. This position paper discusses important issues related to the introduction of such a framework. Doing so, we distinguish two evaluation areas: Business Process Integration and Business Process Management. While the former operates at the technical level of process and application integration, the latter addresses organizational process topics. Starting from those two perspectives we describe benefits, evaluation criteria and metrics that are relevant to set up an evaluation framework.