Reverse Engineering of Enterprise Business Processes - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 99

reverse-engineering has been defined in 1990 by
Chikofsky and Cross (Chikofsky & Cross, 1990)
as “the process of analyzing a subject system to:
a) identify the system's components and their
interrelationships and b) create representations
of the system in another form or at a higher level
of abstraction” . Reverse-engineering is only a
starting point in the lifecycle. A business pro-
cess is never stabilized and it will be subjected
to continuous improvements that are part of the
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) approach.
BPR aims to reform and redesign existing systems
or applications to reach new ones more efficient
and more adapted with the environment (Langer,
2007; Barothy et al, 1995; Tsalgatidou & Jung-
inger, 1995).
The approach of “process mining” defined by
Van der Aalst et al (2003) should not be confused
with reverse-engineering. The goal of the two
approaches is to provide process models from
running processes, but process mining uses events
triggered during the execution of the process to
build a scheduling of the process, while reverse-
engineering Reverse-engineering use several types
of information to build different perspectives of
the business process.
This chapter proposes a method for business
process reverse-engineering motivated by the need
to collect and reorganize the existing knowledge
and to generate models while considering the dif-
ferences between the strategies of the enterprises
and their vision of processes. Goals for modeling
business processes may vary from one organiza-
tion to the other. We summarized these goals in
four major points:

contribution of their work in the scheduling of the
business process. The proposed solution is to give
structured process models consisting of different
levels of details and that are understandable by
the participants.
Facilitating process management. The purpose
of modeling and particularly our purpose in this
chapter are to provide structured processes which
are modeled from different viewpoints and which
are consequently well documented. Naturally,
these processes are easier to maintain than ex-
ecutable processes based on theoretical models
that no longer match with the real process. For
example, when the different relations and flows
between processes are modeled with fine details, it
is possible to predict the influence of an eventual
modification of a process on the others.
Facilitating process execution. Execution con-
stitutes an essential phase in the lifecycle of a
business process. As explained by Muehlen and
Ho (2006) this phase may fail as a consequence
to a number of risks including the lack of a high
implementation view and the lack of a common
language between stakeholders. Thus compre-
hensive models of business process facilitate the
implementation and the automation of business
processes.
Adapting easily processes with their envi-
ronment. Other organizations are involved in
the current context of globalization which has
created a competitive climate. Thus, they are
forced to innovate which explains the need for
flexible models of business processes ready for
improvement. We note also the current tendency
to adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The
evolving number of virtual enterprises on the web
demonstrates the increasing aim of organizations
to exchange their services. Other organizations
choose to merge for strategic reasons. Therefore
they need to model their internal processes to plan
and structure external interactions. For example
the purpose of the University of Grenoble is to
merge the different administrative processes of
the different institutions of university educations

Enhancing comprehension and communica-
tion. Some organizations need to model their
processes to cope with communication problems
between the participants in the process. Actu-
ally, some processes in organizations are yet
considered as black boxes. The distribution of
work is not clearly defined between actors who
have no knowledge of their real position and the