ABSTRACT
Abstract: Business process transformation remains a vital element of competitive power. Building on more than a decade of experience with radical change, organizations continue to transform their business processes in pursuit of competitive advantage. Despite such experience, however, our techniques and tools for process analysis have advanced only negligibly over this period. Process analysis today reflects the same kinds of unsystematic methods linked over a decade ago to precarious reengineering failure rates. The research described in this chapter addresses such problems with process transformation by focusing on process transformation itself; that is, we focus on transforming the process of business process transformation (i.e., process meta-transformation). Targeting explicitly the unsystematic analytical methods that persist in terms of business process transformation today, we integrate and illustrate the use and utility of two diagnostic knowledgebased tools for process analysis. Such knowledge-based tools address directly the knowledge required for effective transformational analysis. This pushes the state of the art in terms of business process transformation and reveals opportunities for immediate practical application. We illustrate the use and utility of this approach through an example of process analysis and transformation in the field. The chapter closes with key conclusions, suggestions for practical application, and topics for continued research along the lines of this investigation.
