Richard Kamm

... courses, 90 EU, I999(%) 6.5 Human resources 101 7.1 Age and education internet divides ... reporting I 17 regular or occasional telework) 7.4 Participation in lifelong learning (% of 25-64 ... This would be a post-industrial society, with technical knowledge and information a principal ...

Riva is a method for identifying two kinds of organisation process architecture: one based on essential business entities, the other on both essential business entities and designed business entities. Riva's designer claims that organisations in the same business will have the same essential process architecture [5]. This implies that for another organisation of the same type an existing essential architecture can serve either as a starting point for designing its processes, or to assess both the completeness of its current processes and the appropriateness of the interrelationships between them. To assess these implications, the authors applied Riva to two higher education organisations in order to create both kinds of process architecture for higher education organisations. The process architectures were reviewed to assess their potential for reuse. The result was that process architectures derived from essential business entities seemed to have the greatest potential for reus...

ABSTRACT Enterprises are increasingly organising their activities and IT support around key business processes. These processes and their interrelationships may be identified in a process architecture. Ould (2005) claims that the Riva method identifies the process architecture that an organisation should have, and asserts that organisations in the same business have the same process architecture. This assertion is not self-evidently true, and it has not been corroborated by the literature. But it is an important claim: if true, then process architectures could be reused either for new process development, or for appraising an organisation's existing architecture. We assessed the assertion by comparing the process architectures produced by applying Riva to two higher education institutions. The results partially support the view that an essential process architecture underpins higher education institutions, and also that for regulated business domains the optimal process architecture may be one based upon designed as well as essential business entities. The conclusion is that process architecture reuse, with its attendant potential savings of time and money, is worth investigating further, even though the extent to which the invariant assertion is testable may not be clear yet.

Bristol Institute of Technology, University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Frenchay Campus, Bristol, BS16 1QY, UK E-mail: Stewart.green@uwe.ac.uk E-mail: Ian.beeson@uwe.ac.uk *Corresponding author ... School of Management, University of ...