Modelo de madurez ISO/IEC 38500

available to all individuals in the organization, improving their awareness about the performance of the organization and their own contribution to it;

2. provide a modular infrastructure that reduces the maintenance efforts for updating business processes due to strategic changes. The concept of adaptable workflows, that are composed of a core process model and a varying number of adapters, help decompose processes in a way that makes easier the task of implementing strategic changes. Adapters can be changed, added, and removed from the system, automatically making changes to the adaptable workflow. We quantitatively demonstrated through a metric of maintenance effort that the strategic maintenance of adaptable workflows is less costly than that of ordinary workflows;

3. provide conceptual basis and tool support to improve the alignment between an employee’s decision choices and the strategic directives of the company. Through the concept of recom-

mendations, adapters apply decision making methods and inform users about how their decision

options affect the strategic performance of the company. The methods proposed also allow for measuring the impact of these recommendations over the performance of the firm. For exam- ple, in a case study described on Chap. 6, we were able to measure how the recommendations affected the decisions of employees. Prior to the implementation of SA-BPM, there was a weak correlation between strategic concerns and employees decisions. After it, a strong correlation was obtained, giving evidences that the recommendations effectively improved the strategic alignment of the company. A simulated scenario was also presented. The simulation showed evidences that recommendations can successfully improve the performance of the organization.;

4. provide conceptual basis and tool support to objectively assess the performance of the organi-

zation and to measure the business processes’ contribution to its strategic goals. The FlexROM

methodology proposed includes a management step in which the efficiency of the organization is assessed and managers’ assumptions are tested. Two main tools are offered to support these tasks. The first one is the automatic mapping from strategy models to path diagrams, which allow the analysis of strategies through the Partial Least Squares method. A second tool is the analysis of correlation between work products generated by business processes and the performance indi- cators they should help improve. This is accomplished through Pearson correlation analysis, on the basis of the concepts of work products and recommended work products.

Our analysis of the literature also produced two additional contributions. The first one is a causal

model to explain how the uncertainty of the environment affects internal factors in the organization

resulting in the decline of its performance. The second one is a set of guidelines on how information technology can help reduce these effects, making the company more apt to deal with environmental uncertainty.

Finally, the FlexROM methodology is also an important contribution of this work. It shows how SA- BPM technology can be applied in practice with a flexible strategy management approach. FlexROM implements the concepts of incremental strategic planning and fulfills several requirements for strategic flexibility mentioned in the literature, such as decentralized decision making and continuous perfor- mance assessment.

The contributions enumerated here meet the objectives proposed for this thesis, which were to: • improve the capacity to identify which operations contribute to each strategic goal and to monitor

their performance on that task;

10.1 LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE WORK 166

• improve the employees’ awareness about how the firm’s strategic goals affect their operations and decision choices.

10.1

Limitations and Future Work

We can recognize some limitations in the work here proposed. The drawback of allowing systems, and business processes in particular, to dynamically change their behavior is the detriment of the capacity to monitor and audit its performance.

It becomes more difficult, for example, to track all processing steps of an order when the process is changed by several adaptations. However, this is an issue also shared by related approaches to business process flexibility. It is still an open question how can we get better control of flexible business processes. The process mining research field may offer the best answers for this question. As long as the tools store sufficient information, process mining and data warehouse techniques can be employed with high chances of success.

Another open issue left by this work is how to perform adequate exception handling. If an adapter fails during its execution, should the system stop the process execution? Should it ignore the adaptation and continue from the point before the adaptation started? Such questions were not approached by this work, but are important aspects to be researched in future work.

It is also necessary to conduct more studies on the approach employed by us to adapt business processes. We opted for a very simple adaptation approach in which activities are inserted in a running process. The reason for our choice is that our objective is to allow for the independent maintenance of adapters. An adapter can be inserted or removed from the workflow without interference on other adapters or on the core process. This improves the agility to update strategic concerns, which is our main objective. Further work should analyze how these limitations in the adaptation approach impact the capacity of designers to implement adaptable workflows. Such a study could reveal some design patterns that could help process developers in the design of adaptable workflows, or could inspire a new adaptation approach that presents a better balance between flexibility and expressive power. An example of future directions for this research is the analysis of its relationship with related work on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). Some works have already taken this subject in the context of BPM [21] and may reveal opportunities for integrating new features to our approach.

Finally, more evaluations need to be undertaken to identify the settings in which the contributions of this thesis can be better explored. The case study and the fictitious scenario described here did not cover all aspects encompassed by our approach, due to their relative simplicity. The major benefits of SA-BPM may be obtained when both business processes and strategies are more complex than those shown in these examples. Evaluations in the real settings of large enterprises can show new directions for the advancement of the SA-BPM approach.