Business process oriented information management: conceptual models at work

Abstract

The reorganization of function-oriented, hierachically structured firms into interacting business process networks of functional islands integrated by flow of material and information is a major challenge for a company that wants to meet the steadily changing business demands of today. As information has become an important production resource during the last decades, the reorganization of information management has to accompany organizational restructuring. In this paper we propose a partially decentralized and business process oriented information management approach for quality management processes. We will describe how conceptual modeling of those processes supports the information system design within this approach. Staring from a presentation of the developed architecture, we will describe our experiences with several information access and engineering mechanisms that make use of the defined conceptual models.