VLPM: A Tool to Support BPR in Public Administration

Representing a law defining some procedures by means of workflow diagrams has various advantages: it facilitates the understanding of the actual meaning of its text, it helps to build a shared vision between law-makers and officers of the public administration, and it provides an easier way to analyze and make public administration procedures more efficient. To keep the model understandable and maintainable, however, the need soon arises to keep traceability between the workflow diagrams and the laws from which the workflows are derived. Moreover - since the public administration processes are defined and regulated by laws - when the workflows are the target of a re-engineering activity, such traceability information becomes essential to identify what laws need to be changed to implement the new procedures. This paper presents VLPM (visual law process modeler). It is a tool that addresses some of the issues mentioned above and that we have used to model the laws regulating the introduction of an electronic election in Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of the autonomous regions of Italy. VLPM is built on top of the UML visual paradigm tool and it is freely available.