Enabling Front-Offi ce Transformation and Customer

Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems ArchitecturesVol. 9, No. 1, June 2014

50 Jorge L. Sanz

Jorge L. Sanz

Enabling Front-Office Transformation and CustomerExperience through Business Process Engineering

The scope of business processes has been traditionally circumscribed to the industrialisation of enterpriseoperations. Indeed, Business Process Management (BPM) has focused on relatively mature operations, withthe goal of improving performance through automation.However, in today’s world of customer-centricity and individualised services, the richest source of economicvalue-creation comes from enterprise-customer contacts beyond transactions. The need to make senseof a mass of such touch-points makes process a prevalent and emerging concept in the Front- Office ofenterprises, including organisational competences such as marketing operations, customer-relationshipmanagement, campaign creation and monitoring, brand management, sales and advisory services, multi-channel management, service innovation and management life-cycle, among others.While BPM will continue to make important contributions to the factory of enterprises, the engineeringof customer-centric business processes defines a new field of multi-disciplinary work focused on servingcustomers and improving their experiences. This new domain has been dubbed Business Process Engineering(BPE) in the concert of IEEE Business Informatics.This paper addresses the main characteristics of BPE in comparison with traditional BPM, highlights theimportance of process in customer experience as a key goal in Front-Office transformation and suggests anumber of new research directions. In particular, the domains of process and information remain todaydisconnected. Business Informatics is about the study of the information process in organisations and thus,reuniting business process and information in enterprises is a central task in a Business Informatics approachto engineering processes. Among other activities, BPE is chartered to close this gap and to create a suitablebusiness architecture for Front-Office where organisational and customer behaviour should guide and benefitfrom emerging data analytics techniques.

1 Process is out of the IndustrialisationBox

Business process has been at the center of thestage in both research and industry for severaldecades. Under the brand of Business ProcessManagement (BPM), business process has attrac-ted a great deal of attention from many practi-tioners and scholars. BPM has been defined asthe analysis, design, implementation, optimisa-tion and monitoring of business processes (Du-mas et al. 2013; Franz and Kirchmer 2012; Rosen-berg et al. 2011; Schönthaler et al. 2012; Sidorovaand Isik 2010). Aalst et al. (2003) defined some tar-gets of BPM: ". . . supports business processes using

methods, techniques, and software to design, enact,control and analyse operational processes involvinghumans, organisations, applications, documentsand other sources of information."1

While the above definitions are quite compre-hensive and broad, in reality most BPM researchand industry activity has grown upon the motiv-ation of reducing operating costs through auto-mation, optimisation and outsourcing. There area several Schools of thought and practice (suchas lean, lean sixsigma, and others (Andjelkovic-

1Aalst et al. (2003) exclude strategy processes from BPM,a remarkable pointthat will be revisited in more depth laterin this paper.

Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems ArchitecturesVol. 9, No. 1, June 2014Enabling Front-Office Transformation and Customer Experience through Business Process Engineering 51

Pesic 2007; Andjelković Pešić 2004, 2006; Näslund2008)) and a myriad of related literature in the last40 years that serve to illustrate the focus on costcontention. Around the middle of the past dec-ade, T. H. Davenport (2005) stated in a celebratedHarvard Business Review paper that processeswere being "analyzed, standardized, and qualitychecked", and that this phenomenon was happen-ing for all sort of activities, stated in Davenport’sown terms: "from making a mouse trap to hiringa CEO". The actual situation is that industry in-vestment and consequential research have stayedmuch more on "trapping the mouse" than in dif-ferentiating customer services through innovat-ive and more intelligent processes, let alone hir-ing CEOs. This may be explained partly fromDavenport’s own statements in 2005: "Processstandards could revolutionize how businesses work.They could dramatically increase the level andbreadth of outsourcing and reduce the numberof processes that organizations decide to per-form for themselves" (bold face is added herefor emphasis).

With the advent of different technologies suchas mobile, cloud, social media, and other digitalcapabilities that have empowered consumers, theclassical approach and scope of business processhave begun to change quickly. Organisations areadopting new operating models (Hastings andSaperstein 2007) that will drastically affect theway processes are conceived and deployed. Asstated by many authors in the last four decades,business process work is supposed to cover allcompetences in an organisation, irrespective ofthe specific skills from human beings participat-ing in such operations. However, in an unpub-lished inspection of about 1,300 papers conduc-ted by the author and some of his collaborators2,most process examples shown in the literaturedeal with rather simple forms of coordination ofwork, mostly exhibiting a flow structure and ad-dressing administrative tasks (like those capturedin early works on office information systems).

2The co-authors are L. Flores and V. Becker both fromIBM Corporation.

Furthermore, the examples provided usually dealwith rather idealised operations, probably offeredas simple examples with the purpose of illustrat-ing theoretical or foundational research results(Aalst 2004; Aalst and Hee 2002; Aalst et al. 2003;Yan et al. 2012). Thus, radically simplified ver-sions of "managing an order", "approving a form","processing a claim", "paying a provider", "deliv-ering an order" etc. are among the most popularexamples of processes found in the literature.

The lack of public documentation of substantialcollections of real-world processes is remarkable.Houy et al. (2010) both confirmed the dominantfocus on simple business processes and also sug-gested potential practical consequences of relatedresearch: ". . . there is a growing and very activeresearch community looking at process modellingand analysis, reference models, workflow flexib-ility, process mining and process-centric service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, it is clearthat existing approaches have problems dealingwith the enormous challenges real-life BPM pro-jects are facing [. . . ] Conventional BPM researchseems to focus on situations with just a few isol-ated processes . . . ". Of course, the list of availablereal-world processes would be a lot richer if oneincluded the set defined by enterprise packagedapplications (Rosenberg et al. 2011). However,this comprehensive collection is proprietary be-cause it constitutes a key piece of intellectualcapital coming from software vendors or integ-rators in the industry.

The traditional focus on process has also raisedmuch controversy. At the S-BPM ONE Confer-ence in 2010, a keynote speaker (Olbrich 2011)remarked: "Let me be as undiplomatic as I pos-sibly can be without being offensive [. . . ] The aca-demic community is as much to blame [. . . ] as thevendors of BPM systems, who continue to reducethe task of managing business processes to apurely technological and automation-oriented level". While other authors in the sameconference debated "who is to blame" very an-imatedly (Fleischmann 2011; Singer and Zinser


52 Jorge L. Sanz

2011) it is important to highlight that the state-ment from Olbrich (in bold face above for em-phasis) reinforces that BPM has mostly followedthe obsession of automation and optimisation bymeans of Information Technology.

A detailed inspection of the extant literature con-firms that business process work has been de-voted to a rather small fraction of the actualvariety and complexity found in enterprise be-haviour. This behaviour enacts many valuegen-erating capabilities that organisations cultivatebased on skills provided by their own workforcesand through rich interactions with other enter-prise stakeholders, particularly customers. Thefollowing points offer a simplified summary:

(1) Business process research in Computer Sci-ence has been traditionally focused on certainclasses of enterprise operations, mostly involvingsimple coordination mechanisms across tasks.This type of coordination and the overall beha-viour represented in underlying models reflectvery much an "assembly line" where work is lin-early synchronised to deliver a desired artifactor outcome. BPMN, emerged from OMG as theindustry standard for business process modellingis a good illustration of this point. Simplicity ofthe choreography is ensured by removing anyform of overhead in communication when mov-ing from one stage to the next. Unlike other morecomplex business processes, many software ap-plications do have this simplified structure. Infact, a trend since the early 2000’s is to separ-ate the specific application logic from the co-ordination / choreography needed across mod-ules, and both of them from the actual data con-tained in a data-base management system. Dif-ferent foundations and a plethora of languageshave been created to capture this semantics ofcoordination such as Business Process ModellingNotation (BPMN), Business Process ExecutionLanguage (BPEL), Unified Modelling Language(UML), Event Process Chain (EPC), Petri Nets,etc.

(2) Resulting process models have typically yiel-ded the form of a "workflow" (Sharp and McDer-mott 2009; White 2004). This means that the activ-ation of a task in the assembly line only occurswhen certain predefined events take place, one ormore previous tasks are completed and their pro-duced artifacts transferred to the next task in thepipeline for continuing "the assembly". In fullyautomated systems, like software applications,this is a good abstraction (see Fig. 1). On theother hand, in actual business processes wherehumans participate or supervise the individualtasks, workflows do not always capture the ac-tual pattern of work, including the contractualcommitments made across role-players.

Consequently, IT systems used to implementsuch workflows, called "Business Process Man-agement Systems" (BPMS) in IT jargon3, are notsuitable to communicate the nature of work tobusiness stakeholders. This point has been ex-tensively addressed in recent Enterprise Engin-eering work (Dietz et al. 2013), such as DEMOand related contributions (Albani and Dietz 2011;Aveiro et al. 2011; Barjis et al. 2009; Proper etal. 2013). The issue of clarity was brought upby Dietz eloquently during a key-note entitled"Processes are more than Workflows" in the 2011KEOD Conference: "With modelling techniqueslike Flowchart, BPMN, Petri Net, ARIS/EPC, UMLand IDEF you get easily hundreds of pages of pro-cess diagrams. Nobody is able to understand suchmodels fully. Consequently, nobody is able to re-design and re-engineer a process on that basis".

Beyond communication issues, the distinctionof contexts between an organisational design

3The term BPMS is somewhat questionable because itimplies that these IT systems implement processes whilethey actually do so only for very special types of processes,i.e., workflows. Thus, the earliest denomination of Work-flow Management Systems (WMS) is more adequate. Asan example, Cases emerged later in the software industryand model more complex processes. The term Case Man-agement Systems (CMS) has been used to distinguish themfrom BPMS. This incorrectly implies "cases are not businessprocesses".


concern and an IT concern should also be care-fully addressed. In the workflow abstraction, thepotential role-players assigned to the executionor supervision of the individual tasks will be"idling" unless they get activated through thepipeline. This model of reality is well-suited tofully automated tasks (like those realised by soft-ware) but unsuited to other situations in organ-isations where humans take part of the processexecution.

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Figure 1: The evolution of information systems devel-opment and the role of BPM systems in the newestgenerations of software (from Aalst et al. 2003).

Indeed, the factory model of operations capturedinto a workflow implies that people are actually"doing nothing" unless their "activation" occursby the preceding tasks in the pipeline. The latteris far from modelling accurately the reality ofwork in most enterprise processes.

(3) The tradition of business process managementworks on the assumption that the investmentmade in optimally designing a process will berecovered through the repeated application ofthe process for a long-enough period of time.The principle is that economic benefits will ac-crue from accumulated cost reduction obtainedby the application of the optimised process overand over again. This approach reflects a true’factory’ in the conception and modelling of or-ganisational behaviour. Furthermore, the idea ofperfecting the process with such an effort pay-ing off through hundreds of thousand repetitions

or even millions of interventions done with thesame process is adversarial to the business needof introducing modifications. As organisationshave been progressively more affected by suddenchange or involved in operations where changeis a common requirement this type of factoryoptimisation does not work. In fact, rigidity ofprocess models has been a long-standing and bit-ter finding. More recently, the broader issue ofprocess evolvability in the presence of continu-ous change has been the subject of solid research,including a recent PhD thesis (Nuffel 2011) andreferences therein.

(4) Implicitly or explicitly in the traditional ap-proaches to business process, it lies the Taylorianprinciple of replacing individuals by applyingautomation whenever possible. As in other busi-ness theories that build on a "dehumanisation" ofenterprises, the consequence is that the role ofhumans as sources of value-creation in processesis ignored. The connection of this foundationand BPM work has been openly recognised byVan der Aalst in his recent review of a decade ofBusiness Process Management conferences Aalst(2012): "Adam Smith showed the advantages of thedivision of labor. Frederick Taylor introduced theinitial principles of scientific management. HenryFord introduced the production line for the massproduction of black T-Fords. It is easy to see thatthese ideas are used in today’s BPM systems".

In close connection to this moral coming fromcertain economics and business schools, it alsoresides the goal of avoiding variation of the pro-cess by all possible means. This good idea origin-ally coming from manufacturing practices (i.e.,reducing variation as a means to controlling qual-ity and cost of the resulting production) has beentranslated to other forms of operations (such asservices) where variation is inevitable when inter-action with non-automated agents becomes anintegral part of the actual production process.4

4Most call centers begin all their interaction with cus-tomers by following pre-established routines. In some cases,this may disgrace the effectiveness of the service and satis-faction of the caller. A known example is when reasonably


54 Jorge L. Sanz

Inevitable process variation is a significant signof ’lost control’, as organisational capabilities gofrom the tangible to the less tangible. As said inLe Clair (2012), the less tangible the capability, themore control will be ceded to the customer. Thetradition of BPM work contrasts sharply with En-terprise Engineering (Dietz et al. 2013), a theoryin which humans are seen as a precious source ofvalue, particularly for achieving improvementsand differentiation. In particular, all processesinvolving interaction with customers offer thisopportunity (services researchers often call thisconcept "co-creation").

(5) It is important to recall that existing processclassifications such as the Process ClassificationFramework (Process Classification Framework(PCF)) reveal common areas of work in organisa-tions that do not follow the BPM tradition in thesense that they do not represent work amenableto workflows. Indeed, PCF is a standardisationeffort in different industries that includes manynon-factory areas of an enterprise. Consequently,these operations are not adequately addressed bythe application of existing BPM research, meth-ods and tools.

The clarification from Van der Aalst and his col-laborators when excluding strategy processes fromthe scope of their work was an excellent andvery early sign, although "strategy" should nothave been the only area excluded from the scopeof their contributions. Indeed, there are othercritical business processes in enterprises beyond"strategy" that do not fit workflow models, PetriNets, BPMN, or related instruments popular inComputer Science (Sanz et al. 2012). Specifically,these other forms of organisational behaviourbeyond ’the factory’ involve complex activitiescarried our by humans in collaboration with oneanother and with the support of technology inways that are observable and may also be cap-tured into process models. This point can also

educated customers are asked first whether their obviouslynonfunctioning product is plugged to the power supply, tounplug and plug it again, try to turn it on once more, andso on.

be easily illustrated by using some of the ProcessClassification Framework (PCF) content.

While some people may argue that this frame-work may arguably be called a process architec-ture (Eid-Sabbagh et al. 2012; Miers 2009; M. A.Ould 1997) it still provides a solid clue of manyoperations that are either common across indus-tries or unique to specific industry segmentssuch as retail banking or consumer packagedgoods. None of these enterprise operations canbe modeled by workflows.

In addition, the componentised business architec-ture and its resulting industry models addressedin Sanz et al. (2012) are also very useful to illus-trate the same points. In these approaches, thereis no functional decomposition at the heart of themodelling, unlike in PCF, and thus the resultingconstruction follows more closely some of thecore principles of Enterprise Engineering (Dietzet al. 2013). This will be addressed briefly in thenext section.

(6) Another important evidence that process hasmoved out of the industrialisation box is CaseManagement (more recently also called AdaptiveCase Management by the authors in (Swensonet al. 2010) and Dynamic Case Management byanalysts in Forrester). The need for Case Man-agement has been illustrated with different en-terprise operations such as claim processing inProperty and Casualty Insurance, customer ap-plications in Social Services, Health Care claimprocessing, Judicial Cases, and so on. Van derAalst and others (Aalst and Berens 2001; Aalstet al. 2005) presented Case Handling as a newparadigm for supporting flexible and knowledgeintensive business processes. In his work on casemanagement, De Man (2009) states that ’work-flow’ is an adequate representation for factory-type, highly predictable behaviour admitting forlittle or no deviation from pre-established models.In recent literature (Khoyi 2010), the argument insupport of the need for Case Management hingedaround the fact that "Case Management allowsthe business to be described in known terms ratherthan artificially fitting it into a process diagram".


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Figure 2: Customers and prospects deal with an enterprise through a number of channels by following patternsor Journeys that vary according to individuals’ goals and behaviour. The picture on the upper side represents theexpected experience of meeting the enterprise as a single and well-integrated entity. However, reality is very differentas channels are not well-integrated, represented visually by the horizontal silos of the lower side picture. Each silohas their own processes, data, strategy (incentives) and IT. Thus, a Customer Journey is the integration of individualcustomer-enterprise touch-points to realise a specific customer outcome. These Journeys are essential processes deeplyrelated to loyalty and other significant measures of customer experience, unlike traditional customer satisfaction metrics.


56 Jorge L. Sanz

2 Process and the Broken CustomerExperience

In the context of this paper, customer experienceis the conjunction of all experiences a consumerhas with an enterprise over the duration of theirrelationship (Harrison-Broninski 2005). Customerexperience is critical for enterprises because ithas been widely understood as a key factor driv-ing customer loyalty (Propp 1968). Poor customerexperience in business-toconsumer enterpriseshas been a top concern in organisations for longerthan five years. The main reason is the pro-found lack of loyalty that customers exhibit inthe business-toconsumer (b-to-c) industries (Cap-gemini 2012).5 While this challenge has been com-monplace in many industry segments, the prob-lem is particularly acute in most b-to-c servicesorganisations where many initiatives have beentaken to address the problem, even to the pointof introducing a new role at the top managementlevel called Customer Experience Officer (Bliss2006).

The advent of multiple channels of engagementfor the same enterprise exposes deeper gaps inthe way organisations deal with their custom-ers. Indeed, multiple channels have generatedeven more disconnects with customers as thesechannels are generally managed by different or-ganisational units and have isolated measuresof performance. Traditional customer satisfac-tion measures tend to focus on individual cus-tomer interactions on a specific channel but thesedo not seem to correlate positively with cus-tomer loyalty (Rawson et al. 2013; Stone andDevine 2013). Figure 2 illustrates customer in-

5In North America, 80% of clients are "happy" with theirbank service but only 50% say they will remain with theircurrent bank over the next 6 months. This reflects thefinding that globally, only 42% of bank customers haverate their experience as being positive. Furthermore, sat-isfaction levels with branches, despite being the most ex-pensive and most developed channel, averages 40% world-wide with highest being 60% in North America (Capgemini2012).

teractions6 taking place across different enter-prise channels (upper side of the Fig.). Thesepatterns are typical for a single customer pursu-ing a specific outcome. In most organisations,each channel behaves as a silo (lower side ofthe Fig.) thus having its own strategy, goals,processes, data and technology. This discon-nect across channels impacts customer experi-ence quite negatively. In summary, a much moreengaged consumer through multiple channelsis making the already disrupted customer ex-perience unmanageable for large enterprises.

All these challenges lead organisations to revisitsome of their core competences related to cus-tomer experience. In fact, a number of key capab-ilities have been emerging over the last decade,starting to yield best-practices for front-office op-erations (Hastings and Saperstein 2007). However,it is the lack of understanding, modelling andinstrumenting critical customer journeys themain reason why customer experience contin-ues to be disrupted and has got worse with theadvent of more channels. Furthermore, aligningthese customer journeys with back-office opera-tions yielding end-to-end business processes is es-sential to enable customer experience. Businessanalysts characterised this new process trend dir-ectly affecting customer experience under dif-ferent names and also alerted practitioners, re-searchers and process professionals about dif-ferent shifts taking place along the entire "hypecycle" of process evolution. In particular, Forres-ter used the name "tamed processes" and char-acterised them as follows: "Tamed processes aredesigned from the outside in, can be driven bybig data and advanced analytics, support socialand mobile technology, provide end-to-end support

6The set of customer-enterprise interactions followed toachieve a specific outcome for an individual costumer hasbeen named customer journey (Rawson et al. 2013). This termhas probably been coined by some technical and businesspeople with the goal of implying that the concept should notbe made part of the classical "process grinding" experiencedthough four decades of BPM, lean six-sigma and the like.Beyond communication intent, journeys are processes andthis is a well-supported fact in Social Science work.


across systems of record and functional areas, andlink on-premises and cloudbased services" (Le Clair2012).

Engineering (i.e., designing and running) thesecustomer journeys is a very different problemfrom those BPM has been focusing in four dec-ades. These needs around modelling and archi-tecting for customer experience are in sharp con-trast to applying Customer Relationship Man-agement (CRM) packaged applications used tomonitor sales, manage customer center calls ordesign optimised workflows for efficient backof-fice processes. In fact, there is a risk that soft-ware may be used precipitately for supportingenterprise capabilities related to customer exper-ience. Indeed, some of these emerging practicesare being made into software without adequateexposure of the underlying business processes.This should constitute a warning to managementas these software applications bury rich busi-ness processes into their packaged software,thus signaling the same issues experienced inmature back-office operations. This warning isa significant call for the adequate research andpractice necessary to surface the key processesbefore they are fully embedded into "concrete",a fact that will impact agility as the frequencyof change in these processes is a lot higher thanin those modeled in conventional enterprise re-source planning. Traditional approaches to busi-ness process instrumentation based on packagedapplications in conjunction with custom BPMsystems come to memory after four decades ofcost-take out and efficiency improvements. Inpart, this rigidity has created fragmented cus-tomer experience as a consequence of the lackof flexibility and long time-to-value for desiredchanges in the information technology systemsdeployed across the enterprise. This is an obser-vation coming from direct practice in the fieldand can also be corroborated by exploring a veryextensive business literature. In short, if front-office processes are not addressed according tothe new business and societal needs, the on-going fragmented experience will result in ad-

ditional loss of loyalty and consequently, cus-tomer equity or profitability issues (Villanuevaand Hanssens 2007).

Probably to the surprise of many data analyt-ics advocates, if customer-centric processes arenot engineered to reflect the demands from thenew economy, the emphasis on individualisingcustomers and "inferring their behaviour" willjust make customer experience even worse. Thereason is that customers will increase their ex-pectations for personalised services while theability for organisations to address this expecta-tion remains far from the current state-of-the-art.This issue will become particularly challengingfor some services industries because (i) such per-sonalisation may not be viable due to the natureof the service being delivered; (ii) personalisationrequires in many cases a co-created design anddelivery, a pursuit that many enterprises are notyet in a position to address; (iii) regulatory lim-itations may prevail thus limiting the enterpriseto discriminate across customers; or (iv) scalab-ility of good quality customer service may be atodds with profitability targets. This remark is anattempt to warn "data scientist" approaches tofront-office operations, as the main disconnectswill only be widened by "data-only" insights.

3 Process in critical areas of theFront-Office

The term "Front-Office" is used here to denotethe set of enterprise activities and resources ded-icated to the support of customer experience. Inthis category, they fall many customer servicemanagement operations. But other Front-Officeareas in organisations also go beyond the pur-pose of dealing directly with customers. Someexamples are brand monitoring, campaign designand deployment, enterprise marketing operations,product and service innovation, customer loyaltyand advocacy management and others amongthe top areas where organisations have been in-vesting in the last decade or so. These enterprisecapabilities and related competences support cus-tomers indirectly, although boundaries may blur


58 Jorge L. Sanz

in some cases (for example, a campaign designmay involve realtime intervention based on cus-tomer interactions). These capabilities are be-ginning to have more visible best-practices andthus, corresponding business processes are emer-ging. Consequently, their study is at the realm ofBusiness Process Engineering because they en-compass key work-practices. These operations in-volve humans and collaborative activities deeplyinterrelated with technology and information,and their patterns of work are also emerging,become more and more visible, being subjectedto white box modelling rather than remaining asblack boxes. In these new process areas, Inform-ation Technology will still be essential but inradically different ways from "the factory" of en-terprises. Actually, translating those experiencesfrom Information Systems in the Back-Office tothe Front-Office is a sure recipe for disaster. Thisinadequate translation would also add significantlongterm strategic and cost-centric consequencesto the ongoing broken customer experience.

Searching for further practical evidence on theemergence of non-traditional enterprise areasneeding process study, it is important to revisitin depth some theories of organisational designand related work by different business researchschools (Penrose 2009). Figure 3 shows an or-ganisation of the resource-base of a typical en-terprise into four distinct types and the corres-ponding bundling of such resources into disjointbusiness components. Each column on the righthand side of the Fig. represents one typical com-petence whose organisation is described by thegeneric concepts of the column on the left, aspresented in Sanz et al. (2012). Although a dif-ferent language was used, the foundations ofthe structure of a generic competence should behonored to Brumagin in Brumagim (1994), amongother more recent business researchers.7

7This is probably the only known actionable model de-rived from the general and powerful concepts running un-der the denomination of Resource-Based View (RBV) inthe theory of the firm. Business process researchers arestrongly encouraged to delve into RBV, search for cross-pollination with related Social Sciences work, and revisit

Notice that the hierarchy of resources represen-ted in Fig. 3 does not mean the same as the clas-sical management concept of "control". Instead,it only represents an arrangement in which dif-ferent skills, information, assets (intangible andcapital) and derivative entangled capabilities arebundled together to produce one or more relev-ant outcomes in the enterprise. Likewise, thesecomponents are not necessarily aligned with tra-ditional Lines-of-Business and do not intend tomap departmental capabilities or other conven-tional "reporting structures" in enterprises. Revis-iting Penrose (2009), the components highlightedon the right may be thought as the formalisedgrouping of resources whose entanglement pro-duces those core services (internal or external)that the organisation needs to serve all stake-holders. Some enterprises may be endowed withsome of these resources in unique ways, beingalso more idiosyncratic for some industries thanothers.

Concrete models recently built for many industrysegments by following the modularisation prin-ciples reveal that there are hundreds of busi-ness components that the business process tra-dition has failed to address. In fact, most pro-cesses available from the research literature fallin the category of operations involved in thelast row of business components, i.e., productionand maintenance processes. As the level of in-volved resources moves into oversight and man-agement, several interesting examples of casesmay be found and used to illustrate the typeof operations at play. Going further into learn-ing and innovation, traditional contributions fadequickly or disappear entirely. Interestingly, thetop row of Fig. 3 includes the ’strategy processe’that Van der Aalst and collaborators explicitlyexcluded from their foundational work in theearly 2000’s. A diversity of processes like thoseneeded for controlling the quality of a cartoon inan entertainment industry enterprise, managingthe pipeline of compounds in a pharmaceutical

business research topics such as those addressed in Organ-isational Behaviour schools.


Figure 3: The four types of resources defined according to the different forms of behaviour that are observed in a genericenterprise (left). Componentised organisation of such resources based on different competences (right). Each of thesecomponents deals with a number of core subjects (Nandi and Sanz 2013) whose evolution is key for the definition ofcorresponding competences (columns in the picture)

company, and disseminating the learning harves-ted from a specific family of consulting practicesthroughout a services enterprise should not be in-cluded under the term ’strategy’. However, theseoversight and management processes have notbeen addressed by the BPM tradition.

There may be still an argument that processes inclassical BPM work aim at modelling operationsacross the components and not inside them, i.e.,end-to-end processes also called ’value streams’in some business literature. However, this argu-ment does not necessarily follow from inspectingthe work reported in more than one thousand pa-pers in the last twelve years. The BPM traditionhas adequately responded to the need of min-imising transaction costs across the enterpriseand builds upon existing governance mechan-isms defined as true systems of control alignedwith functions (Le Clair 2012). In that sense thetraditional approach has followed closely the en-terprise disconnection and rigidity leading tothe present state-of-the-art in customer exper-ience. Moving the foundational basis to addressthe next generation of business process (called"hybrid connected processes" in Le Clair (2012)),crossfunctional and complex processes (i) can-not be made or realised into workflow structures

and (ii) new languages are needed to close theremarkable communication gap left in the cross-enterprise process space. It would be impossibleto address these statements in full detail herebut it should suffice to say that loss of visibilityin cross-enterprise processes is a proven pain-point (Nandi and Sanz 2013) still yielding well-identified performance and communication prob-lems in many firms. In other words, the "hundredof pages" alluded by Dietz (2011) are real and theinsight that these many pages have unraveled isminimal.

From a research perspective and practical pointof view, the reader is referred to the recent workin Nandi and Sanz (2013) for evidence that themain ’value streams’ across an enterprise arein fact progressions of core subjects and not life-cycle of objects, at least when the latter is un-derstood in the tradition of statemachines, i.e.,artifacts evolving through a number of micro-states that separate the initiation and comple-tion of "tasks". This fact goes back to the funda-mental way metaphysics of processes has beenapproached in Social Sciences (Rescher 1996) andthe conceptual duality between process and sub-jects8 in the organisation of the world of a gen-

8The word "subject" here means "theme" or "topic". This


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eric enterprise. Indeed, subjects are higher-levelabstractions than conventional objects and theirevolution is thus subjected to lots of asynchron-ous activity taking place across the enterprise.The delivery of outcomes produced by these asyn-chronous activities signals the completion of ne-cessary results as agreed in pre-determined cross-functional commitments. These commitments are,in fact, a form of organisational contracts andmay be regarded as quite granular macro-statesin the evolution of an individual subject. These’states’ are called milestones in Nandi and Sanz(2013).

The need for aligning the research agenda in pro-cess to the main challenges faced by industrywas also called out in the closing recommenda-tions from the BPM study in Indulska et al. (2009):". . . despite being an actively researched field, anec-dotal evidence and experiences suggest that thefocus of the research community is not alwaysaligned with the needs of industry". A couple ofyears have elapsed since related papers were pub-lished but the situation has not changed much.Reijers et al. (2010) also addressed the import-ance of rooting BPM activities in industrial prac-tice and correctly questioned the understandingof the actual adoption of BPM by organisations:". . . it may come as a surprise that contemporaryinsights are missing into which categories of organ-izations are adopting BPM and which type of BPMprojects they are carrying out". Actually, Aalst(2012) did some justice in his recent review ofresearch in the last decade of BPM Conferencesand highlighted that this work mostly addressedautomation concerns. In particular, Van der Aalstrevisited BPM systems as an opportunity to fur-ther position BPM tools as valuable instrumentsto build better software applications.

While this traditional BPM research work andpractices should definitely continue, new markettrends and needs from new enterprise capabil-ities in the Front-Office strongly suggest that

differs from the interpretation of subject as an actor carry-ing out an activity, and thus, it should not be confused withrelated semantics in S-BPM.

business process focus has to shift in order tocontribute to other urgent goals in organisations.Business process is called to play as a key in-strument for achieving the customer experienceneeded in front-office operations and deep end-toend integration of the latter with the back-officein enterprises. The main motivation for the newwork needed does not hinge around cost reduc-tion, industrialising routine operations or build-ing better software with BPM systems.

4 Back to Process Foundations

The evolution of business process has nothappened without significant divergence and tosome extent, also confusion. The state-of-the-art is plagued by language chasms, cultural silosand idiosyncratic viewpoints. Some of these chal-lenges were documented in De Man (2009); Indul-ska et al. (2009); Recker et al. (2009); Reijers et al.(2010) and others. Reijers et al. (2010), state thechallenge in clear terms: "Considerable confusionexists about what Business Process Managemententails . . . ". Indeed, the definition of businessprocess is still troubled by ambiguity and addingthe term "management" has done little to clarifythe confusion. A plea for this clarity has beenarticulated by Olbrich (2011): "It seems a pity thata lot of current research fails to provide a basicdefinition of what underlying understanding of’process’ and ’BPM’ it bases its work on". In fur-ther exchanges in the same S-BPM conference,other authors such as Fleischmann (2011); Singerand Zinser (2011) agreed that the problem goesfurther into a lack of clarity on the very defin-ition of BPM. A review of the literature showsthat there is not a single and agreed definitionof these terms. While ". . . a scientific foundationis missing" was clearly stated by Van der Aalstback in 2003, the review of BPM Conferences pub-lished by the author a decade later confirms thatthe fundamental shortfalls have not been over-come yet (Aalst 2012). The underlying reasonis deeply related to the nature of business pro-cess being a socio-technical system and thus, its


complexity cannot be approached by a narrow fo-cus on technology dimensions. In Fleischmann’sown words: ". . . sociological systems like organ-izations are combined with technical systems likeinformation and communication technology. For aholistic view of business process management wehave to consider all aspects" (Fleischmann 2011).Weske (2012) also highlights the deep nature ofprocess: "a business process consists of a set ofactivities that are performed in coordination inan organizational environment. These activitiesjointly realize a business goal." While using differ-ent language, other authors also defined businessprocesses (Davenport 1993; Debevoise 2007; Du-mas et al. 2013; Indulska et al. 2009; Krogstie et al.2006; Ould 1995a; Smith and Fingar 2007 and thelist goes on).

The Object Management Group recognised thefoundational problem with the definition of pro-cess. Siegel (2008), the leader of the BPM groupstated: "there is no agreed-upon industry defini-tion of Business Process. Instead, there are multipledefinitions, each looking at the field from its ownunique point of view, concentrating on its own setof concerns". Certainly, it is not a matter of onedefinition being right and the others being wrong.Rather, the issue is about the varying points ofview used. As a consequence, the main efforts inprocess modelling standardisation have not yetyielded the expected outcomes, as discussed inRecker et al. (2009), more broadly exposed in In-dulska et al. (2009) and highlighted in Aalst (2012).Unquestionably, most people do have a similarand informal notion of "business process". Butthis intuitive agreement does not mean a conver-gence across viewpoints. In fact, the variationsin the definition of process may suggest that theterm is a boundary object across disciplines, in-dividuals from different units of an organisationor communities of practice. Other researchersin Social Sciences and Philosophy have also fo-cused extensively on the concept of process andits definition. Ven (1992) addressed the topic inthe context of one of the most complex typesof processes in organisations, i.e., the strategy

process. The depth of Van de Ven’s classificationreveals the foundations underlying many busi-ness process definitions. In spite of having beenpublished two decades ago, this work has goneunnoticed in most of the BPM literature (Aalst2012; Aguilar-Savén 2004; Klein and Petti 2006;Ko et al. 2009; Lu and Sadiq 2007; Ould 1995b;Propp 1968; Toussaint et al. 1998; Trkman 2010and many others).

Another language chasm across different schoolsof thought or communities of practice is the un-clear relationship between the concept of busi-ness process and that of organisational routine.Rich literature is available on the study of routines(Becker 2004), the significance of routines as aunit of analysis for organisations (Levin 2002;Pentland and Feldman 2008; Pentland et al. 2012)the collectivist meaning of routines and the needfor establishing solid micro-foundations (Felinand Foss 2004) among others. It is very likely thatbusiness process and routine address identicalconcerns in organisation theory; however, inspite of the prolific technical production in thetwo subjects during decades, their formal rela-tionship and the reasons for keeping two differ-ent terms remain unclear.

More recently, there has been a fundamentalpiece of work in process that builds upon a recon-ciled view of process and information availablesince the early days of the Information Engineer-ing schools in Europe. This approach to businessprocess goes under the brand of entity-centricoperations modelling (Sanz 2011) and offers a hol-istic approach that reunites different types ofprocesses under the same conceptual understand-ing. This entity-centric concept has been usedintensively by (Ould 1995a,b) and although thenotion of life-cycle is from the early 1980’s, sev-eral important contributions has been made indifferent industries and software to merit a de-tailed inspection in Business Process Engineering(Bhattacharya et al. 2009; Cohn and Hull 2009;Nandi 2010; Nigam and Caswell 2003; Robinson1979; Rosenquist 1982).


62 Jorge L. Sanz

Quite interestingly, another related approach wasrecently presented to model cross-functional end-to-end processes in enterprises based on the no-tion of subjects and nexus of commitments (Nandiand Sanz 2013). The foundation for all this workappears as an important step toward the designand construction of different process types, in-cluding the so-called value streams, by using acommon approach in which information doesnot take back seat as a mere "after-thought" inthe modelling of behaviour or becomes confusedwith "state model", being the latter a commonmisunderstanding incurred by most computerscientists as Van der Aalst remarkably noted. Thepoint of reunion of these seemingly related mod-elling techniques does not reside in "artifacts"or "object life-cycle" but instead, it goes back tothe Social Sciences in the sense that the unifyingconcept is the very epistemology of process, i.e.,"things in the making" (Tsoukas 2001; Tsoukasand Chia 2002). Consequently, process design isabout describing the evolution of a core subject.While the roots of this approach come from sev-eral decades of work and different schools ofthought, not all process researchers and practi-tioners seem familiar with these concepts andrelated literature sources.

5 Research topics in Business ProcessEngineering

It would be difficult to propose here a completeagenda of research and practice in Business Pro-cess Engineering. Like in any other emergingfield of work, only the pass of the time, com-munity activities and market consolidation willdetermine its boundaries and shape its ultimatepriorities. However, based on current work andongoing industry needs, it would be safe to high-light some important areas with the purpose ofstimulating further research.

This is a first pass through such a list. Topics areclassified according to four basic categories:

Customer-Enterprise Behaviour: Foundations andModels

(A) Establish a foundation for understandingand modelling the journeys that customers fol-low in their multiple touchpoints when inter-acting with enterprises across different chan-nels. These journeys are probably the mostlooselycoupled type of processes, i.e., they arehighly unstructured but they are not "randomwalks" at all as customers seek for specificoutcomes. This type of interactions is alsofound in other collaborative work in enter-prises (Harrison-Broninski 2005). In addition,as involved interactions combine and altern-ate human-to-human and human-todigital con-tacts, these journeys are rich in informationand behaviour. Then, their adequate under-standing is imperative for the next generationof customer experience. Some work has beendone on this topic but there are no foundationsyet with a theory that explicates the journeysand how behaviour of the actors should beguided from footprints of customer contactsand previous experiences. This is one of themost fundamental research problems that dif-ferent industries need to benefit from as itsvalue is directly related to customer loyalty.

(B) Discover customer-enterprise co-creationmechanisms and have them reach a massivescale through innovative processes. This willsupport the social transformation necessaryfor the information coming from social datato become a trustable source of actual beha-viour and intent of individuals. While so-cial media means a flood of useful data, in-ferring human intention and behaviour fromthese sources remains illusory. Co-creation pro-cesses deploying collaborative and mutuallybeneficial practices appear essential for thenext generation of customer experience. Ex-plicit provision of knowledge on an individualcould be then done in exchange for personal-ised services or some other form of tangiblevalue-propositions. This will lead individualsto provide trustworthy evidence of their beha-viour and intent. Designing and implement-ing the necessary processes to reach the scale


needed requires deep socio-technical innova-tion. These processes will also help encouragefull transparency from consumers and enforceaccountability from companies. The latter willhelp replace today’s legal disclaimers in whichconsumers are asked to resign their privacyrights under terms-and-conditions that prob-ably few consumers read and even a fewernumber of them understand.

(C) Create a "sociology of the customer" thathelps understand the effect of using mass pro-cesses even with individualised clients in thepursuit of ’profitability’. If economic analysisrenders it viable, data footprints left by con-sumers will not be the only hint to infer cus-tomer behaviour (which is an erroneous ap-proach to understand people’s needs and trueexpectations anyway). Furthermore, the integ-ration of process and big data will allow forfull operationalisation of "insight", thus mak-ing the latter move from "interesting discov-ery" to a Social Science-supported theory toenhance services and provide enterprises withhigher customer equity.

Front-Office Business Architecture

(D) Propose complete Front-Office operationalmodels that represent the actual work enter-prises do with and for their own customers.This should include process and performanceframeworks for all those key competences andcapabilities in the enterprise that belong to theFront- Office operations. In particular, the cre-ation of solid Process Reference Architecturesfor emerging operational areas in marketing,brand management, campaign management,etc. would be critical for accelerating industryvalue of new research. As suggested earlier inthis paper, surfacing and documenting thesenew workpractices is essential. Software pack-ages are already in the market and these ap-plications bury important processes whose fre-quent change is imperative for flexibility ofFront-Office operations.

(E) Reconcile the ever-deepening silos of Inform-ation and Process. As suggested by the differ-ent levels shown in Fig. 4, the information andprocess domains have traditionally evolved inalmost complete isolation from each other. Asdamaging as this disconnection may result forthe well-being of any organisation, the prob-lem has stayed unresolved throughout severaldecades. In fact, the gaps have widened andgot deeper as the new "business analytics"trend has been getting momentum in enter-prises and gathering the attention of the ChiefMarketing Officer. The introduction of "bigdata" and other marketing concepts in Inform-ation Management technology has continuedto widen the chasm. Hopefully, by building ona new foundation where the Information Pro-cess in organisations and society is repurposedas a single phenomenon through Business In-formatics, new bridges will be built across thetwo silos. This reunion is dubbed "Deep Pro-cess meets Business Analytics" on Fig. 4. Theneed for this integration will reposition "pro-cess analytics" as the integration of on-line(real-time) analytics and customer journeys.

(F) Provide data-only analytics and related stat-istical modelling with a better foundationthrough behaviour-based causation. Thisshould help foster a blended approach through"white box" Enterprise Engineering modellingfor today’s decision-making techniques basedon "black-box" statistics. Among other areas ofcritical enterprise value, this topic should alsohelp define an enterprise business perform-ance framework that integrates behaviour anddata in organisations. This goal correspondsto achieving the important integration shownin the top level of Fig. 4.

(G) Develop a theory of Process Modularisationthat is consistent and evolvable with change.This work has been initiated by different col-leagues in (Nuffel 2011). As the "unit of change"in Process gets progressively more clear, thetopic of Process Evolvability will also becomeconnected to modularisation, thus addressing


64 Jorge L. Sanz

Scorecards

Big Data Massive Analy5cs

Analy5cs Capabili5es for LOBs

(Transac5onal)

Business Intelligence (from ERPs)

Data

INFORMATION SILO

Value-‐Driven Process

Management

Opera5onal Process Innova5on

Con5nued Process Improvements and

Flexibility

Cross-‐Func5onal Processes

Process Flows and ERPs

PROCESS SILO

Enterprise Performance Management

Intelligent Business Opera5ons and

Systems

Adap5ve / Agile Opera5ons

Business Visibility Modeling (BVM)

Business En55es Modeling &

Execu5on (BELA)

Process and Business Analy<cs

Integrated

Deep Integra+on

Figure 4: Silos in information and process management have deepened with the evolution of each domain. This gap ismore notorious after the advent of business analytics, scorecards, performance management and value-driven processBPM

the need for managing combinatorial effects(as already addressed by the general principlesof Normalised Systems Theory in (Mannaertand Verelst 2009) for the case of software sys-tems).

(H) Clarify the distinction, if any, between theSocial Science concept of organisational routine(Pentland et al. 2012) and the broader meaningof process coming from Business Process En-gineering. This will help reconcile work acrossthe different schools of research in Social andComputer Sciences. While practitioners sel-dom use the word "routine" (and when theydo, they imply repetitive or boring tasks whichis not the meaning in Social Sciences), it isimportant to benefit from cross-inseminationbetween Enterprise Engineering and Social Sci-ence research for better understanding of or-ganisational design through deep behaviourresearch.

(I) Benefit from Enterprise Engineering princip-les to reposition the role of humans in thevalue-creation of Front-Office business areas.This topic has several deep social connota-tions and should include the provisioning ofeconomic evidence of the scalability (or lackthereof) of human-centric methods for under-standing individual behaviour of customers.

Industry-Oriented Content

(J) Create industry-specific multi-channel cus-tomer journeys for key services industries suchas banking, insurance, retail and telecommu-nications. Link to and support these customerjourneys with knowledge-based representa-tions that bridge process and knowledge man-agement. This is a significant area of workthat will pave new integration of Process withKnowledge Management by creating a cus-tomer-centric knowledge-based organisation of


the enterprise. The meaning of the latter state-ment is about making all pertinent informa-tion from an enterprise to be organised and bemade available to customers in new, intelligentways in which "process footprints" serve as ahistorical base to reorganise and find informa-tion personalised to individual customers (thiscomment comes from a private communica-tion with P. Nandi).

Tooling

(K) Propose new tools that further the currentstate-of-the-art of Information Technology forprocess design and construction in the concertof a Business Process Engineering approach(in this connection, the generation of code is asecondary concern but flexible and open endto-end integrated capabilities would be a break-through). These process tools will be the car-rier of data analytics in real-time while sup-porting the delivery of personalised servicesto individual customers.

6 ConclusionsBusiness Process has left the productivity cornerwhere it has been confined by "scientific manage-ment". With the advent of customer-enterpriseinteractions of all forms and exercised throughmultiple channels, the need for a significantlyimproved customer experience is an imperativein transforming front-office operations. Conven-tional approaches to process have proven to havea devastating effect on loyalty. Renewed researchand professional efforts to approach process aspart of complex social systems are a must to copeFig. 4. Silos in information and process manage-ment have deepened with the evolution of eachdomain. This gap is more notorious after the ad-vent of business analytics, scorecards, perform-ance management and value-driven process BPMwith the challenges faced in those competences ofenterprises dealing with customers, particularlyin the business-toconsumer industries. BusinessProcess Engineering is a new domain of workthat attempts to make the past IT-centric viewof process into a multidisciplinary area of bothinstitution and practice knowledge.

7 Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitudeto many colleagues for inspiring discussions onbusiness process in the context of Enterprise En-gineering, Business Informatics and practical con-notations of all these domains. A few names arementioned here: J. Verelst, H, Mannaert, J. Di-etz, E. Proper, A. Albani, P. Nandi, M. Indulska, J.Sapperstein, J. Sphorer, H. Hastings, M. Cefkin,J. Barjis, B. Hofreiter, C. Huemer, J. Tribolet, V.Becker, L. Flores and many others. Sincere thanksare also due to two referees for their invaluablecomments.

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