Policy-driven process mapping (PDPM): Toward process design automation

Abstract

Recently, many organizations are investing a great amount to revamp their business policies in order to comply with the new regulations related to Sarbanes-Oxley. For organizations with large-scale business processes, maintaining those processes to meet the changing policies is a non-trivial problem. In this paper, we present an innovative process mapping methodology named Policy-Driven Process Mapping (PDPM) that takes advantage of detailed organizational policies. In particular, we show how narrative process-related policies can be formalized and how process maps can be systematically created via a set of rules and algorithms. Our research contributes to business process management by providing a theoretical foundation for the development of advanced process mapping tools, thereby taking the first step toward automatable process design procedures.