Towards a Knowledge Base of Business Process Redesign: Forming the Structure

Many reasons drive organizations to improve their existing business processes. Designing an improvement is complex; it requires familiarity with the process under consideration and vast knowledge and expertise in the field of business processes. Therefore, there is no substitute for an expert judgment while designing a process improvement. Yet, experts’ knowledge is limited by their experience. In this paper, we present our vision of supporting more informed expert decisions. This vision is based on designing a knowledge-based solution in order to facilitate sharing experience from past cases gained by various organizations. More specifically, this paper focuses on the first step that is required for constructing a knowledge base: designing its structure. To formulate a representative structure, we studied cases reported in literature and formulated a baseline structure grounded in the reviewed literature. We examined its coverage for additional cases originating in literature and added additional features where needed, until we reached saturation. The proposed structure distinguishes between the features that characterize a situation that leads to a redesign act and the set of improvement actions performed as a result.