Abstract

Advocates of Business Process (BP) approaches argue that the real value of IT is that it provokes innovative changes in business processes. Despite the fact that many BP and IT academics and practitioners agree on this idea, BP and IT design are still performed separately. Moreover, there is very little research that is concerned with studying the ways in which IT supports BP. The ASSESS-IT project examined this domain and proposed the use of simulation techniques to achieve BP and IT integration. The outcome of this project gives indication that describing the dynamic behaviour of IT could be very helpful for BP modellers in predicting the impact that the insertion of IT may have on organisational processes. This paper describes the rationale of the simulation framework used in the ASSESS-IT project and analyses the results obtained when applying this framework to a case study in order to reflect about the advantages and limitations of this approach and to identify possible areas for further research in this domain.

Citations