Towards goal-driven access to process warehouse: Integrating goals with process warehouse for business process analysis

Analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises. An emerging approach to analyze business processes is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by implementing process-oriented data warehouse and mining techniques. However, very little work has been done on employing business orientation in the design and utilization of process warehouse, which greatly limit the number of users who are able to fully exploit the potential of warehouse technology. The approach presented in this paper, addresses that limitation by attempting to integrate business goals with warehouse. The proposed approach to integration spans across two levels, conceptual and implementation; the first defines the concepts that are used to relate goals and process warehouse; the latter is used to implement the concepts and the relations, to link warehouse data and goal records in relational databases. The proposed approach enhances the way users access warehouse data and interpret the data. To facilitate the use of the proposed approach we have implemented a prototype. The evaluation results, though preliminary, provides evidence of the usefulness of our approach.