business process engineering

The goal of business process engineering (BPE) is to define architectures that will enable a business to use information effectively.

 When taking a world view of a company‘s information technology needs, there is little doubt that system engineering is required. Not only is the specification of the appropriate computing architecture required, but the software architecture that populates the ―unique configuration of heterogeneous computing resources‖ must be developed.

 Business process engineering is one approach for creating an overall plan for implementing the computing architecture .

 Three different architectures must be analyzed and designed within the context of business objectives and goals:

• data architecture

• applications architecture

• technology infrastructure

 The data architecture provides a framework for the information needs of a business or business function. The individual building blocks of the architecture are the data objects that are used by the business. A data object contains a set of attributes that define some aspect, quality, characteristic, or descriptor of the data that are being described.

 The application architecture encompasses those elements of a system that transform objects within the data architecture for some business purpose. In the context of this book, we consider the application architecture to be the system of programs (software) that performs this transformation. However, in a broader context, the application architecture might incorporate the role of people (who are information transformers and users) and business procedures that have not been automated.

 The technology infrastructure provides the foundation for the data and application architectures. The infrastructure encompasses the hardware and software that are used to support the application and data. This includes computers, operating systems, networks, telecommunication links, storage technologies, and the architecture (e.g., client/server) that has been designed to implement these technologies. 

The final BPE step—construction and integration focuses on implementation detail. The architecture and infrastructure are implemented by constructing an appropriate database and internal data structures, by building applications using software components, and by selecting appropriate elements of a technology infrastructure to support the design created during BSD. Each of these system components must then be integrated to form a complete information system or application.

 The integration activity also places the new information system into the business area context, performing all user training and logistics support to achieve a smooth transition.