BUSINESS PROCESSES UNDERPINNING INFORMATION

SYSTEMS

A Higher Education Institution’s Framework

Nuno Pina Gonçalves, Sérgio Paulino and Tiago Silva

Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Rua Vale Chaves - Campus IPS, Setúbal, Portugal

Keywords: Business Processes Framework, Higher Education Institutions, Organizational Semiotics.

Abstract: Organizations have increasingly raised concerns in relation to its processes and the quality of service. There

are many methodologies for management processes such as Business Process Management (BPM) and

Software Oriented Architecture (SOA). These methodologies alone do not seem to be able to cover all the

specific model of Higher Education Institutions (HEI), and it is necessary to integrate Process Management

methodologies with Organizational Semiotics to obtain the necessary signals for quality management. With

the help of Semiotic Pentagram Framework (SPF), Dynamic Essential Modelling of Organizations

(DEMO), Language Action Perspective (LAP) and the Theory of Organized Activity (TOA) we present a

framework adapted to the HEI where, after reviewing the options regarding the semiotics, we choose to use

the Semiotic Pentagram Framework. The various views of the SPF scheme cover larger part of the HEI

activities and needs process. To do that, we will use an approach to Strategic and Business Information

Systems. Our objective is to apply the framework at one of IPS schools - Superior School of Health (ESS).

1 INTRODUCTION

Information Systems (IS) development raises many

important challenges to organizations and

institutions. Nowadays, depending on the type of

organization, to some extent business processes are

supported by some kind of IS. Emerging

organizations want to examine processes across their

lines of business to discover which one is the best of

breed. Other organizations are looking for the

improving their existing processes, or even to

automate them. In some countries, government

regulations require that business processes be

properly documented. These are among the many

drivers in the business world today that are making

organizations take a closer look at their processes.

The first question that arises is that if organizations

and institutions have all the same kind of

characteristics. In this work we defend that higher

education institutions (HEI) nowadays have new

specific challenges and characteristics. In the socio-

economic Portuguese context Polytechnic Institutes

and Universities are centralizing services, decision

making processes and IS. It is not unusual to have in

this context information and procedures islands

lacking a desirable integrated access to

information, finding many reasons to capture their

business processes in order to obtain top level

indicators and competitive advantage in face to other

HEI's. In order to understand the HEI business

processes we have studied different kinds of

approaches to the business processes capture and

creation of top-level indicators: the dynamic

business processes approaches like Business Process

Management (BPM) and Software Oriented

Architecture (SOA) and other approaches like

Organizational Semiotics, the Semiotic Pentagram

Framework - SPF, Dynamic Essential Modelling of

Organizations (DEMO), Language Action

Perspective (LAP) and the Theory of Organized

Activity (TOA). In this paper we present a

framework that we have created merging Hoshin

Kanri matrix with the alignment between the

Strategy and Business Information Systems, BPM,

SOA and the SPF Framework and we define

methodological aspects in order to validate this

framework using one of IPS schools - Superior

School of Health (ESS).

226

Paulino S., Pina GonÃ

galves N. and Silva T.

BUSINESS PROCESSES UNDERPINNING INFORMATION SYSTEMS - A Higher Education Institutionâ

Zs Framework.

DOI: 10.5220/0003266802260235

In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations (ICISO 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-8425-26-3

2 MOTIVATION AND

CHALLENGES FOR HEI'S

In the last two decades, computer science

revolutionized the communication and the access to

the information, opening new challenges to the

organization of the work and the business processes

related to education and learning in HEI. Computer

science opens multiples challenges to the “new

school”, in the field of the management of the new

paradigms of functioning and in the support of new

forms of education and in way it generates the new

paradigms of learning (Macedo P. , 2008).

The paradigms of education are in a process of

change in the current school as well as learning. The

changes in the society and education in the European

community demand that the management of the

schools is boarded of another form. A school is an

organization form where the process of main

business is the training/education of individuals. A

school in its essence “sells” the acquisition of

abilities and generates knowledge - elements basic

resources to manage in the schools. Schools not only

need to have one politics of knowledge

management, but also to access the applications that

allow them to manage the knowledge - its main

capital.

School was always an important pillar of the

communities. School is an active element of the

social and academic community establishing bows

of communication and contribution with its partners.

The technological structures will have to support and

to facilitate the management of the activities and

business processes, allowing not only the allotment

of resources, but also the coordination of the

business processes and activities allowing the

creation of top level indicators.

HEI are institutions that take on very specific

characteristics deriving from its activities, its size, or

even its management framework and autonomy that

the law provides. With organizational structures

unclear, inflexible, and difficult to define and with

very weak lines of authority, decision-making

processes have been very tightly hemmed in by

different collective bodies mostly independent of

each other and often with diametrically opposed

views on the objectives of institution.

Additionally, at HEI exists high turnover at the

top management positions, causing a general failure

to promote a sustained process of continuous

improvement. Finally, with regard to the core

activities of HEIs, including the activities of

teaching and learning, are presented with very

transverse processes, with multiple actors with

responsibilities for decision making, some of them at

the same level but with little coordination, with long

cycles of achieving and with little consensus about

who are the intended recipients / customers

(UNIQUA/IPS, 2009). HEI have been created the

need to adopt quality systems and continuous

internal improvement, which are associated with

effective processes of decision making so that they

have a concrete effect on administrative activities,

financial, scientific and educational.

The institutions are being evaluated according to

the quality of performance, measuring the degree of

compliance of its mission, through performance

parameters of action and results. According to A3ES

(Agency for evaluation and accreditation), the

Portuguese institutions are subject to evaluation and

accreditation in order to be entered into the

European system of quality assurance in higher

education. With the "Bologna Process" the

institutions may be subject to comparisons and

rankings mechanisms, and quality performance, very

important factors to get a good position.

The Bologna Process enables to compare with

another high school and provides the Global

recognition .The Bologna Process aims to create a

European Higher Education Area by 2010, in which

students can choose from a wide and transparent

range of high quality courses and benefit from

smooth recognition procedures. The Bologna

Declaration of June 1999 has put in motion a series

of reforms needed to make European Higher

Education more compatible and comparable, more

competitive and more attractive for Europeans and

for students and scholars from other continents.

Reform was needed then and reform is still needed

today if Europe is to match the performance of the

best performing systems in the world, notably the

United States and Asia. IS in HEIs need to be well

designed and have to provide key performance

indicators (KPI) that will be compared among other

institutions. One of that KPI are the Bologna Reports

that all the courses in HEI need to have visible to

everyone, every year.

In this sense, in order to achieve greater internal

quality, UNIQUA/IPS (UNIQUA/IPS, 2009)

proposes the implementation of the IPS performance

evaluation model based on a process model

approach of HEI resources.

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3 A HIGHER EDUCATION

INSTITUTION IS: IPS

INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information systems exist to support the activities of

organizations and institutions, its mission,

objectives, strategies and business processes.

Therefore, by definition, information systems have

to be aligned with the business strategy. But that

does not always happen, especially because business

is dynamic, and change and information systems

rarely have the flexibility to accompany these

evolutions (Laudon K. & Laudon J., 2007).

Five years ago, IPS evidenced that it was very

difficult to gather integrated information from the

students as well as from the teachers. IPS and the

schools needed to get management indicators and

felt that information was spread on small non

integrated information systems. All the stakeholders

of the education process needed to have access to

their information online and it was not possible to

obtain that information without a new integrated

system. Besides consisting in a central repository

and unique access point, a web portal will allow to

access information outside institutions facilities.

It would be a competitive advantage to IPS to

give students and professor’s access to lectures, as

well as, all important academic data. All the systems

with this kind of requisites usually take several years

to become in production in a stable way. It was

created a team that started to analyze all the

available academic information systems all over the

country. Two years later the team defined finally

that there was only a really stable, solid and tested

system that meet the identified requirements to be

installed in IPS – SIGARRA.

SIGARRA’s system architecture is an integrated

Web based information system, a student’s

management applications (GA) and human resources

management application (GRH), its main

characteristics are: Information integration, Web

interface and Modularity and configurability. As

IPS has five schools and two more organic units, all

of them used different procedures to the

organizational processes. The main idea was to

standardize the processes in all the schools. The

adopted implementation methodology consisted on

the migration of the old systems at each school one

by one to minimize the impact in services and

increase the team expertise. Beside the lack of

standardized procedures another challenge was the

fact that the legacy systems didn’t have enough

documentation, so the migration process needed to

be validated several times to assure data consistency.

While the migration was in progress, the web portal

started being installed and customized (Goncalves

N. & Sapateiro C, 2008).

SIGARRA - Information System for the

Aggregate Management of Resources and Academic

registers (Ribeiro, L. & David, G., 2001) which is a

stable, robust, widely tested and continuously

updated, IS for higher education institutions in use in

several Portuguese institutions.

SIGARRA is a really very good IS, but its

implementation process and its characteristics

determined that the top-level indicators are not

easily obtained as well as the business processes are

heterogeneous even many of them having the same

goals and output information. So, the aggregation of

the information in order to help decision making is

not as effective as it should, not permitting to make

comparisons among schools and services.

Usually top management defines the strategies

looking for the results and not to the needs. One way

to allow doing this is to review the processes and the

stakeholders (e.g. students, professors, collaborators)

SI-IPS implementation adopted, because of

political, financial and organizational factors, was

the adaptation of each organic unit to the IS, and this

brought a problem – the system was adapted to each

organic unit instead of potentiating the

harmonization of all the existing processes.

This can be a sign that the organic units do not have

clean structured procedures. IPS is betting on

improving the quality and in the management of

business processes. Question: "the management of

organizational processes fits on high school?" The

need to implement process management comes from

standardization of the processes. It is important to

harmonize the processes. It is necessary to create

valuable indicators, which allow top management to

control the processes. They only can control the

processes that have defined or someone defined for

them. On IPS exists orientation to results, rather than

guidance on process and quality.

4 PEOPLE AND PROCESSES

People in organizations are the most important

element, for two specific reasons: they are the

suppliers and the customers. But alone they cannot

produce a quality service. This is because people

cannot know whether the processes that lead to the

final result are optimized and have the desired

quality. This is where the management of processes

ICISO 2010 - International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations

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appear, one of the most important issues of today's

organizations.

Processes, along with people, are of the most

difficult to manage in the direction of an

organization. And the explanation can be justified in

many ways: processes not defined and planned;

processes that fail; resources for processing; unclear

objectives; lack of process control; motivation of

people to implement them; bureaucracy processes.

The functional units of the organizations are

beginning to no longer be considered as a discrete

set of isolated and well defined borders, and this

increases the difficulty of managing the processes.

The growing trend to be seen as flexible and

interconnected groups of information flows that

cross horizontally the units in that group activities, is

a reality that is rooted in the movements of

reengineering (Hammer, M. & Stanton, S., 1999)

and JIT (Just in Time) (Ten Have, S. et al., 2003;

Coopers & Lybrand. 1999). Organizations come to

be seen as a group of incompletely linked groups

and for this reason there is great need to manage

processes (UNIQUA/IP, 2009).

Business process drivers can be summarized into

three major categories:

• Documentation. Companies need to capture

business processes so that others can understand

how they work, who is involved, and how

activities flow from beginning to end. Typically

a business analyst who understands how the

processes work models these processes.

• Redesign. Many businesses want to improve

their business processes to reduce inefficiencies,

drive down costs, and respond faster to customer

requests. A process cannot be redesigned before

it is understood, so it must first be captured.

Redesign can only come after you have properly

documented the process. Typically a technical

analyst, or perhaps an IT liaison to the business

who understands both the business needs, and the

I/T systems models these processes.

• Execution. In most cases, the best way to

improve the efficiency of a business process is to

apply automation to it. If you can reduce or

eliminate manual work, the process can be

performed faster and at a lower cost. To apply

process automation, the business IT staff or a

consultant must write code or use a middleware

product. It would not be advisable to automate an

inefficient process. For this reason, this phase

should only occur after you have redesigned the

process.

In a organization exists process associated with the

mission and the processes on which all activities

Figure 1: Global Processes Model (Pires A., Lourenço R.,

2010).

of the institution relates, however exists other

processes and not directly connected with the

mission of the institution but have a particular

importance in the overall management (figure 1) and

can be defined (Pires A. & Lourenço R., 2010):

1. Processes that affect all other processes and

activities of the institution, including the macro-

processes, classified by integrated processes, and

take responsibility for organizational

convergence, by establishing global forms of

action both internally and externally.

2. Processes focused on supporting the internal

structures and processes arising from them,

classified by support processes, and without

them organization hardly reach their goals.

It is important to IPS to restructure and define the

procedures to improve quality. At this point is

important to talk about two types of management:

Quality Management and Process Management

(Business Processes and Support Processes).

The processes that we will aboard are the

Dynamic Business Processes and several

methodologies can be applied in the organization,

like BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA

(Service-oriented architecture) and with Semiotic

approaches is possible to link dependencies of the

processes that not suffer any alterations on the

organizations, that can be viewed like the skeleton of

organization's processes.

Organizational Semiotics can help to see how it

behaves throughout the process of information in the

organization, helping to validate the flow of

information by groups of the organization and deals

with organizations such as information systems

where information is created, processed, distributed,

stored and used. Thus becomes the organization as a

system of dependency where the result of a process

may depend on another process.

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229

The management processes should be adapted and

appropriate to the educational reality, which may

have a role in this standard approach as it sees an

organization as interconnected and interacting

processes by which it achieves the desired

objectives. For this is necessary to HEI's clarifying

its mission and vision, with emphasis on the ability

to provide their recipients / customers products and

services recognized by the social, environmental,

cultural and economic values

(Pires A. & Lourenço R.,

2010).

So there is a need for applying something

different, because of the specificity of HEI

specificities, whereas management methodologies

common processes do not fit very well. Interactions

are large and actors many with different needs.

A good process management combined with

organizational semiotics can improve the quality of

how the whole service is provided while improving

the definition of all processes and dependencies. So

suppliers and customers realize what the procedure

is carried out to reach the expected result. These are

the processes that make the organization sustainable

to offer an educational quality of service allowing

continuous monitoring and improvement.

5 DYNAMIC BUSINESS

PROCESSES APPROACHES

5.1 Strategic Planning in the context of

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture refers to both the process and

the product of the application of systematic methods.

As a complex process, enterprise architecture may

use a framework of methods and conceptual tools.

An early coining of the term "enterprise

architecture" to refer to both the process and product

was by Steven Spewak (Spewak et al., 1992). This

book defined one of the earliest process frameworks

for enterprise architecture. One formal definition of

the architecture of an enterprise comes from

the MIT Center for Information Systems Research:

“Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic

for business processes and IT infrastructure

reflecting the integration and standardization

requirements of the firm’s operating model” (Weill,

P. MIT, 2007).

This enterprise architecture has mechanisms to

ensure alignment between information systems and

the strategic objectives of the organization. The

enterprise architecture is a method that involves

the application of a set principles and models to

understand artefacts essential in organization,

namely to understand the business, technology

and and how is their evolution over time. Its divide

by: the organizational, business, information,

applications and technology architectures.

In a brief description, these five architectures are

defined by:

• The organizational architecture understand the

core aspects of the company, as vision, mission,

strategic objectives and the structure of the

company (like a organization IPS has a strategic

plan);

• The business architecture describes all the

activities (processes business) developed by the

company to achieve its objectives (ex:

teaching/learning; I&D; services and consulting);

• The information architecture describing the

structure of qualified information

that organization needs to develop the business

processes (ex: disciplines, programs; school;

IPS);;

• The application architecture describes all the

necessary applications that support business

processes and make use of entities. In

this architecture is include de CRUD matrix

(Create, Read, Update, Delete) that describes and

analyzes the relations between the activities of

the processes and manipulated information in the

context of business (ex: information system,

student’s management applications (GA) and

human resources management application

(GRH));

• The technological architecture describes

the infrastructure of hardware, network and

software that supports business needs.

In an approach of the reality, the best way to meet

this need is adopting the Hoshin Kanri matrix

(Jackson T., 2006) because it allows doing the

representation in a single piece of paper the various

interrelationships among the critical factors of

company strategy. With this method it can achieve a

result positive to show that it is possible to ensure

the alignment between the business strategy and

technology strategy to help improve performance of

the organization.

In the figure 2 is an example of a final Hoshin

Kanri matrix with the alignment between the

Strategy and Business Information Systems.

Relation 1 is the alignment between strategic

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230

Figure 2: Hoshin Kanri matrix with the alignment between

the Strategy and Business Information Systems.

projects of the company with its strategic options,

the relation 2 shows which the indicators reflect the

choices company's strategic, the relation 3 identify

business processes that support each of the strategic

projects, the relation 4 identify the business

processes that will produce each of the indicators of

strategic management (information useful in

implementing a system of Balanced Scorecard or

“Tableaux de Bord”) and finally the relation 5

identify the responsible for business process (High

R. et al., 2009).

Management change is a problem with an impact

on processes and systems information and with this

matrix is possible to have a control change of the

alignment between business and information,

allowing viewing and understanding the

consequences of alignment processes, informational

entities and applications. With this the enterprise

architecture can help to clarify the role of

information systems in business, in a strategic

perspective business, especially if it is considered as

an alignment tool should be implemented

dynamically by the company.

Dynamic business processes and models enable

organizations to optimize business performance and

rapidly respond to changes in competitive,

economic, and market conditions.

By continuously improving key business

processes across systems and people with business

process management (BPM) and a solid business

strategy, businesses can streamline operations, create

agile business models, and reduce enterprise costs.

By discovering, documenting, deploying, and

optimizing business processes and models,

businesses can transform the way they work by:

• Delivering agile business models that

rapidly adjust to changing customer

expectations and business demands

(curriculum design continuously based on

market and society needs; using the best

pedagogical knowledge; using the best

technologies);

• Empowering people to operate in real-time

with detailed process visibility, and new

insights from sensors and events for

smarter decisions and actions (monitoring

and becoming available relevant data to the

stakeholders, in adequate time, as well as to

processes managers/Program managers );

• Flexibly automate and extend business

processes to easily find and use the best

resources anytime, anywhere (supporting

activities and processes in IS).

5.2 BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to

provide the alignment of business processes with the

strategy, with goals and create a value chain for the

organization.

The Management of Business Processes uses the

best management practices, such as the mapping of

processes, modelling, determining the level of

maturity, documentation, communication plan,

automating the monitoring, establishment of

performance indicators and the cycle of continuous

improvement. The aim is the continuous

improvement of processes to achieve the expected

results.

These practices applied help maximize the

results and performance of procedures, and so do

organizations have better financial performance,

competitive advantages, reduce costs, optimize

resources, increase customer satisfaction through

products, increased employee satisfaction, which

leads to services with a superior level of quality.

5.3 SOA and BPM

Figure 3: BPM and SOA integration.

The value proposition of Service Oriented

Architecture (SOA) is centred on agile and aligned

business and IT design and delivery. The ability to

architect the alignment between business and IT is a

hallmark of SOA, and is the cornerstone for derived

BUSINESS PROCESSES UNDERPINNING INFORMATION SYSTEMS - A Higher Education Institution’s Framework

231

business agility, reduction of cost and risk, as well as

improved portfolio management.

The notion of business process optimization has

been around much longer than SOA. Yet, around the

same time that SOA became a mainstream

architectural style, the focus in many process

optimization communities shifted subtly to one of

Business Process Management (BPM). The key

distinction for BPM as a discipline is added focus on

flexible and dynamic process design as well as

process orchestration and automation through IT

enablement. This provides the foundation for agile

business optimization and IT responsiveness, a

particular aspect of business and IT alignment.

While BPM and SOA each have value on their

own, they are naturally synergistic, and best when

done together for business and IT agility,

optimization and alignment. When done together,

BPM provides the business context, understanding

and metrics, and SOA provides a governed library of

well architected service and information building

blocks (figure 3). Both are, in fact, needed in order

to dynamically optimize investments, drive

operational excellence and manage business risk.

Note that a valuable side effect of doing BPM

and SOA together is enhanced collaboration across

business and IT boundaries. Communication and

collaboration are brought to life through simulations

and visual models of process and service

orchestrations, as well as through explicit business

contracts that govern the horizontal linkage between

business units and the realization of end-to-end

processes.

SOA can be beneficial to IPS in several ways; the

common theme among ctive. And when

combined with BPM, SOA can be even more

effective (Serra N., et al., 2008).

6 OTHERS APPROACHES

6.1 Organisational Semiotics - OS

Organisational Semiotics (OS) seeks to present new

and useful ways to understand human information

and communication systems from an organisational

perspective. According OrgSem

(http://www.orgsem.org), OS is emergent discipline

whose purpose is to study the nature, characteristics,

functions and effects of information and

communication within organisational contexts. The

use of semiotics helps by providing many interesting

ideas that can be studied, developed and applied in a

business and/or organisational context (Gazendam

H. & Liu K., 2005).

6.2 Dynamic Essential Modelling of

Organizations - DEMO

Dynamic Essential Modelling of Organizations

(DEMO) is a cross-disciplinary theory for describing

and explaining the action of organisations. An

organization is conceived as a (discrete dynamic)

system, of which the elements are social individuals

or subjects, each of them having the authority to

perform particular (objective) actions and a

corresponding responsibility to do that in an

appropriate and accountable way (Gazendam H. &

Liu K., 2005). For the coordination of their actions,

the subjects enter into and comply with

commitments towards each other. To perform a

transaction is needed actions and interaction of the

individuals (Barjis J. et al., 2001; Dietz J., 1999).

DEMO fits in a fairly new and promising

perspective on business processes and information

systems, called the Language/Action Perspective.

The pioneer of the L/A Perspective is undoubtedly

Fernando Flores. The L/A Perspective assume that

communication is a kind of action in that it creates

commitments between the communicating parties.

6.3 Language Action Perspective –LAP

The Language/Action Perspective (LAP) introduced

in the field of Information Systems by Flores and

Ludlow. Organizations have the intrinsic problem of

communication between groups is of extreme

importance, and according to Fernando Flores

communication is exchanging sentences, expressing

some proposition with the aim of creating

commitment between the parties. This

approach, contrasting to traditional views of "data

flow", emphasizes how people communicate, what

people do while communicating, how language is

used to create a common shared reality and how

people use communication to coordinate of their

activities

(http://www.fsc.yorku.ca/york/istheory/wiki).

6.4 Theory of Organized

Activity – TOA

Created by Anatol Holt, Theory of Organized

Activity (TOA) is based on ‘human’ activities which

occur within every organization or business system.

Human action or act is the key element for the

structuring and planning of all activity processes. Its

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232

dependence is based strictly on the human element,

where computers and information technology is just

a supporting tool. For the modelling of these

dependencies is the language used Diplan (Cordeiro

J. & Filipe J., 2004).

6.5 Semiotic Pentagram Framework -

SPF

Focusing on the human factor, the Semiotic

Pentagram Framework (figure 4) is an alternative

sign model with four different views of the sign:

Interpretational, Relational, Communicational,

Physical and Work (Cordeiro J. & Filipe J., 2004).

The Interpretational View is interested in a passive

interpretation of signs where the sign already exist

and its possible creation is not the emphasis of the

analysis, the Physical View emphasis is on a

material view of the signs with less attention to any

source of meaning from the signs being carried, the

Relational View is concerned with all kinds of

relations between signs where they distinguish here

between formal relations and informal relations, the

Communicational View is one of the most important

view because the concern here is to communicate, so

signs are studied from their use within a

communication perspective, and the Work View that

is a study on the relation between signs and the

common activities or work practices (Cordeiro J. &

Filipe J., 2004).

Figure 4: The Semiotic Pentagram Framework.

7 THE BUSINESS PROCESSES

FRAMEWORK FOR HEIS

(BPFHEIS)

We propose a framework, named Business Processes

Framework for HEIs (figure 5), with three

objectives: improve quality of processes; build a

process portfolio and create procedures

documentation. It is very important to view how

whole phases work together, in order to create an

educational framework that allows a better process

management. With process portfolio we want to

create a document with all procedures of HEI that

can be useful to control and optimize it. BPMS

allow us to evaluate and analyze, in a simulated

environment, if the services and processes are well

defined, removing the cost and complexity of the

implementation of the model. Obtaining a simulation

of how it works, thus achieving optimal even before

approaching the real environment of the

organization. This methodology is intended to be

more agile and adaptable to HEI, and the

requirements delegated. There is a continued focus

on optimizing that seeks to increase the quality of all

processes in any of three levels: meta-processes,

processes or sub-processes. This framework has 3

phases:

Phase 1:

• Define the strategic options and strategic

projects

• Identified the top-level indicators that allow

monitoring development of strategic goals

• Describe the business processes

• Identification of informational entities

• Identify the applications (with CRUD

matrix)

• Create a survey to map the existing

processes, with the matrix Hochin Kanri

and CRUD Matrix

Phase 2:

• Analyze services supported by

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

• Re-design the processes with tools like

BPMS (Business Process Management

Suite)

• Apply Redesigned Processes and services

Phase 3:

• Use Organisational Semiotics - SPF

approach to relate human and technology

factors

• Analyze the dependencies

• Processes Optimization

• Create a survey that allows evaluating the

optimization and increasing quality of

processes.

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Figure 5: The Business Processes Framework for HEIs.

8 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In the educational context processes optimization

and quality enhancement can lead to changes that

our framework intends to become milder with a

wider range of areas within the HEI. The approach

using enterprise architecture, SOA and BPM

manages processes, but only with the help of

semiotics, using the SPF, can we really validate how

information moves within the organization, and the

responses of the various views that can help us in

further analysis. We present a framework that

enables the optimization of processes and the

approach to the institutional strategy, giving a good

set of very useful business indicators to help

decision making in HEI. The application of the

framework may ensure business processes

management optimization and quality towards the

success of HEI information systems.

Thus, because of the specific nature of the organic

unit, it is our objective to apply BPFHEIs at

ESS. This choice was due to school size is small,

with few procedures and therefore we expect to be a

good organization to apply this framework at the

beginning, making the ESS a case study, being the

next step to apply the framework in other IPS

organic units.

A Process Management appropriately adapted

and adjusted to reality, has a key role, since this is

help to achieve their objectives and this

framework is one more added value to the IPS, to

implement an internal quality and brings to the

institution a competitive advantage in

the rigorous educational "market".

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