Reverse Engineering of Enterprise Business Processes - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 98

Chapter 7
Reverse Engineering of
Enterprise Business Processes

Ansem Ben Cheikh
Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, France

Agnès Front
Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, France

Dominique Rieu
Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, France

AbstrAct

In the current context of globalization and with the increasing need to automate the work, modeling business
processes has become essential. Modeling helps not only to understand processes but also to anticipate
changes and build a flexible structure. In this chapter the authors adopt from software engineering the
concept of reverse-engineering. For organizations with unmodeled BP, reverse-engineering is a way to
provide process models ready for improvement or usage in other stages of the business process lifecycle.
This chapter proposes a method for business process reverse-engineering fulfilling these requirements.
It consists of a multi-view metamodel, covering all perspectives of a process, and a detailed approach
to guide the business process modeler. The approach was tested on a web application from the French
academic Information Systems.

introduction

processes are running in the enterprise without
being based on formal models. They could be
based on out-of-date or unstructured documents
and on knowledge of process participants. Then
it is essential for these enterprises to reorganize
information about processes in order to generate
process models useful for the following steps of
the lifecycle like automation and monitoring. As
a consequence, relevant modeling methods are
needed like reverse-engineering which is a solution
to model existing business processes. The word

The Business Process Management (BPM)
approach is gaining a lot of success (Trkman,
2009) and technologies supporting BPM are
evolving continuously. This is related to the fact
that the success of an organization depends on
its control of its business processes throughout
their lifecycle. But in some cases, business