Ensuring quality in process design: Tracing requirements to people and systems

Information systems are implemented to support business processes to enable efficiency through automation while maintaining the effectiveness of the process. The focus often is to reduce the cost and time in performing business processes. Business Processes automated using workflow systems often ignore the structure and responsibility of people who are integral to it. This paper introduces an approach to trace the quality required of the people and systems to their responsibilities, thereby highlighting the people centric view of processes. The responsibilities that people have, been further classified into Governance, Management, Administration and Knowledge work areas to ensure completeness and further responsibility delineation. The approach also builds in the mechanism to assign responsibilities to people and systems. This includes differentiation of the responsibilities as specific and generic; and their relationship with roles.