Business Process Monitoring

Funded by Centerlink
Partners:	–
Duration:	2012 – 2013

Centrelink has hundreds of business processes defining, for example, how claims are processed, payments are handled or complaints are managed. Each business process consists of numerous tasks that are either executed automatically by one of the subsystems in Centrelink IT infrastructure, or manually by a staff member. Most of these business processes are artefact-centric, meaning that business documents are the core entities that initiate the business processes and are manipulated by different tasks in the process. The set of business documents that instantiate/trigger a workflow is referred to as Work Items (WI) in WMS.  The WI could be as simple as a request from a customer to change the address to as complex as claiming baby bonus by filling a large number of forms.  It is important to note that a simple WI may trigger a very complex workflow, e.g., change of address may have impact in many benefits received by a customer. Monitoring business processes and tracking work items’ status within a business process is a challenging problem. It may be done within a specific IT infrastructure through the use of infrastructure monitoring tools. Typically, these monitoring tools are best suited to largely homogenous IT infrastructures. However, within Centrelink, a workflow dealing with an individual work item uses a large variety of business processes. These processes may be implemented in a range of IT environments, including mainframe and midrange systems. Commercial Off-The-Shelves (COTS) tools are not suitable to monitor business processes and track the status of work items in such heterogeneous operational environments. The inability or difficulties faced in using COTS business process monitoring tools are magnified significantly in the implementation of Service Delivery Reform (SDR). In this case, there are now different operational IT infrastructure environments in the Department of Human Services (DHS), including those in Medicare and Child Support Agency (CSA). Therefore, DHS needs an underlying IT infrastructure independent “end-to-end” business monitoring solution.

The purpose of this project is to compliment WMS initiative by extending/utilizing existing MI/OI infrastructure and proposing a WMS application for monitoring various tasks within business processes and tracking the status of work items.  Therefore, our focus in this project will be more specifically on work item events. This project will design and develop a prototype WMS application that monitors the business processes and tracks work items across business processes using work item events.