SLAs, KPIs and BPMN Standard for the Digital Transformation of the Enterprises’ IT Business Processes

Abstract

Business processes are at the heart of the enterprises’ operations and management. An accurate business process modeling ensures the continuous improvement and the easier change management of the enterprises’ business processes. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard is considered to be the state-of-the-art business process modeling standard in enterprises. To further regulate the business process operations, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are applied by the enterprises so as to guarantee the service level of their own operations. An SLA, which is a contract agreement, consists of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are the SLA measurable characteristics and the SLA quantitative means to assess and benchmark the provided service levels. In the light of the digital transformation of today’s enterprises, the evolution process of enterprises’ business processes to the next generation SLA – aware business processes that are based on the BPMN standard and the KPIs is analytically proposed in this paper. To implement the aforementioned evolution for the enterprises’ Information Technology (IT) business processes, two methodologies are proposed in this paper, namely: (i) The SLA-aware BPMN IT business process lifecycle; and (ii) The interdepartmental SLA definition framework. The MATLAB / Octave simulation results of a real enterprise’s BPMN IT business process, which is regulated by an SLA of two main SLOs with the corresponding KPIs, are provided. The simulation results are discussed to support design concept, effectiveness and benefits of the proposed methodologies. Finally, the MATLAB / Octave simulation code is freely distributed with the Supplementary Material file of the paper.