Technology-driven business evolution

Innovating the business processes and supporting software systems of an enterprise requires their preliminary analysis and assessment. In particular, data concerning the performance and costs of activities and processes must be gathered in order to identify candidates for innovation. A critical point is finding a suitable presentation means for the gathered data in order to effectively support decision makers. This paper presents two case studies performed by applying a strategy, named Joint Evolution of business Processes and software Systems (JEPS), for innovating business processes and their supporting systems. JEPS integrates measurement, decision-making, and critiquing techniques for analyzing business processes, identifying activities and software systems to be innovated, and mapping critiques onto specific innovation actions. JEPS is supported by a software environment, named WebEv+, for managing the assessment and evaluation tasks, and the modeling and critiquing of the business processes. The paper discusses two case studies regarding two different organizations in the Local Government domain. The analysis of the organization highlighted improvement goals and technological enhancement needs, and permitted the identification of the business processes and software systems to be evolved. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved