The Integration of Process Simulation Within the Business Architecture

To deal with increased competition and technological change, organizations need to strive for a continuous improvement of their business processes. To realize this, simulation models offer a suitable approach to test different process alternatives. In particular, discrete-event simulation employs stochastic models to support operational decision-making inside the organization. However, this operational focus might cause sub-optimization with respect to higher-level organizational goals. Therefore, an integrative view on the business architecture might align strategic, organizational and process perspectives. This has resulted in the expansion of the Process-Goal Alignmentmodeling technique with a simulation mechanism. This paper augments the previous research efforts by including simulation results expressed by confidence intervals, such that the results of process simulations can be accurately integrated with the overall business performance. The design of the business architecture simulation technique is guided by the Design Science Research methodology. This paper communicates about both the design and the demonstration of the simulation technique, while the evaluation of this artifact is subject to future research.