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A case study on consistency management of business and IT process models in banking

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Abstract

Organizations that adopt process modeling often maintain several co-existing models of the same business process. These models target different abstraction levels and stakeholder perspectives. Maintaining consistency among these models has become a major challenge for such organizations. Although several academic works have discussed this challenge, little empirical investigation exists on how people perform process model consistency management in practice. This paper aims to address this lack by presenting an in-depth empirical study of a business-driven engineering process deployed at a large company in the banking sector. We analyzed more than 70 business process models developed by the company, including their change history, with over 1,000 change requests. We also interviewed 9 business and IT practitioners and surveyed 23 such practitioners to understand concrete difficulties in consistency management, the rationales for the specification-to-implementation refinements found in the models, strategies that the practitioners use to detect and fix inconsistencies, and how tools could help with these tasks. Our contribution is a set of eight empirical findings, some of which confirm or contradict previous works on process model consistency management found in the literature. The findings provide empirical evidence of (1) how business process models are created and maintained, including a set of recurrent patterns used to refine business-level process specifications into IT-level models; (2) what types of inconsistencies occur; how they are introduced; and what problems they cause; and (3) what stakeholders expect from tools to support consistency management.

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  1. http://gsd.uwaterloo.ca/empiricalstudybpm

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Bank of the Northeast of Brazil (Banco do Nordeste, BNB) for granting us full access to people and artifacts, fundamental for conducting this study. This work was partially supported by an IBM PhD CAS Fellow Scholarship, the Ontario Research Fund’s Research Excellence Project on Model-Integrated Software Service Engineering, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61202071 and No. 61121063.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Generative Software Development Laboratory, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Moisés Castelo Branco & Krzysztof Czarnecki

  2. Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, (Peking University), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China

    Yingfei Xiong

  3. Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yingfei Xiong

  4. IBM Research-Zurich, Rüschlikon, Switzerland

    Jochen Küster & Hagen Völzer

Authors
  1. Moisés Castelo Branco
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  2. Yingfei Xiong
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  3. Krzysztof Czarnecki
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  4. Jochen Küster
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  5. Hagen Völzer
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Moisés Castelo Branco or Yingfei Xiong.

Additional information

Communicated by Dr. Tony Clark, Balbir Barn, Alan Brown, and Florian Matthes.

Appendix: Basic BPMN notation

Appendix: Basic BPMN notation

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Branco, M.C., Xiong, Y., Czarnecki, K. et al. A case study on consistency management of business and IT process models in banking. Softw Syst Model 13, 913–940 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0318-8

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